KENT CROWLEY SPECIAL TO FOOTHILLS READER

Today, California makes 90 percent of American wine – a tasteful legacy with roots in the foothills.

Some 175 years ago, Tiburcio Tapia’s majordomo Jose Maria Valdez planted the Mother Vineyard along the east bank of Cucamonga Creek.

For decades, the Cucamonga Valley held the largest and most famous American vineyard.

Yet, the history and the wine might be very different today had it not been for a mysterious disease that wiped out the Cucamonga Valley’s only real rival – and may be the reason we call one neighboring county Orange County.

Water underground

Just before Ontario Vintner Secondo Guasti discovered the underground aquifer that produced non-irrigated grapes, all of the vineyards in Southern California were irrigated from surface water sources, such as the Santa Ana River and its numerous tributaries.

What was once the most successful of those vineyards began prior to the Civil War when a group of German immigrants planted grape cuttings in a little village they called Anaheim (basically drawn from a German phrase meaning “home on the Santa Ana”).

Purchasing nearly 1,200 acres for $2 per acre, the settlers hired civil engineer George Hansen to design vineyards that between 1860 and 1885 produced more than 1.25 million gallons of wine annually.

Bug and blight

In 1886, Anaheim vintners discovered the leaves on their grapevines turning brown and yellow from a strange blight that strangled the vines within a few years.

Fortunately, a new cash crop – navel oranges – had arrived a decade before that allowed Anaheim to transition from a vineyard economy to a citrus economy.

It would be half a decade before California’s first professional plant pathologist, Newton B. Pierce, discovered the cause of the blight, which was later named Pierce’s Disease. The blight is spread to grapevines adjacent to riparian habitats that occur along stream and riverbanks.

Since the Anaheim vineyards were irrigated from surface water flows and the majority of Cucamonga Valley vineyards tapped into an underground lake, local vineyards were less affected by the blight.

The carrier of the blight, a bacterium called Xylella Fastidiosa, was an insect called the Sharpshooter (of the family Cicadellidae) that naturally migrated to citrus groves.

Grape County?

As the Anaheim vintners replaced more vineyards with citrus groves, they actually hastened the demise of their own wine industry.

The greatest legacy of the blight might be the name Orange County.

One aspect of the region considered by the founders when choosing the name of the newly formed county in 1888 was the image of an orange as a marketing ploy.

Had the decimated Anaheim vineyards not been replaced by orange groves, might Orange County be called “Grape County?”