Drive past 12467 Baseline Road this month and the sign out front reads d'Ellena Winery & Vineyard. If you've lived in Rancho Cucamonga more than a few years, your first reaction is probably confusion. That's Filippi's. You took out-of-town relatives there. You bought a bottle of the port for a housewarming gift. The name on the building has said Joseph Filippi Winery for as long as most residents can remember.
Here's the part that surprised even longtime locals when it came out: the Filippi family never founded that winery. They leased it. For 31 years, they operated a business inside a building that belonged to someone else, on land the city of Rancho Cucamonga has owned since 1993. When their lease ended and a new operator took over the site in 2025, the new name wasn't really new. It was older than Filippi's by nearly eight decades.
A Winery Older Than the Name You Know
The building at Baseline Road goes back to 1916, when Claudio Ellena, an immigrant from Australia, established a winery in what was then the town of Cucamonga. His sons Frank and John B. Ellena took it over and eventually renamed the operation Regina Winery. Two other brothers, Louis and Arnold Ellena, worked the business as distiller and winemaker respectively.
Regina wasn't a boutique operation. By 1959 it was the nation's leading producer of wine vinegar, shipped under the Regina Grape Products name. The property drew visitors as something closer to a roadside attraction than a working farm: daily self-guided tours, an annual grape festival, and a herd of miniature horses imported from Argentina that became a local curiosity in their own right. In 1968, the site opened what's recorded as the first restaurant built on a California winery property.
Production slowed through the 1970s. The site changed hands through Heublein and later Del Monte before the city of Rancho Cucamonga's redevelopment agency purchased the roughly 14-acre property in 1993. Soon after, the city leased it to the Filippi family, who had been making wine elsewhere in the region since 1922. The Filippis ran the site as Joseph Filippi Winery and Vineyards starting in 1994, and for most residents who moved to Rancho Cucamonga after that point, Filippi's was simply what the winery was called. Nobody driving past the tasting room on a Saturday afternoon was thinking about the Ellena brothers or a herd of Argentine ponies.
Why the Sign Went Dark
By the early 2020s, Rancho Cucamonga knew the Filippi lease wouldn't last forever. In 2021, the city solicited proposals to redevelop the historic parts of the site into something larger: a mixed-use destination with hospitality, dining, and open space built around the winery's history. Three finalists made it through review. By spring 2022, the city concluded that none of the proposals matched what the community wanted, and the redevelopment effort was shelved.
In the meantime, visitors dealt with something more mundane: unpredictable hours. Online reviews from the winery's final years describe showing up during posted business hours only to find the doors locked, a pattern frequent enough that visitor guides started warning people to call ahead before making the drive. That kind of friction tends to compound. A historic site that's occasionally closed when it says it's open slowly stops being a place people plan a trip around and starts being a place they mean to get back to eventually.
What Replaced It
The eventual answer wasn't a resort or a restaurant group. In February 2025, the property transitioned to National CORE, a nonprofit developer, which took over revitalizing the site. Rather than erase the Filippi era and pretend the site started fresh, the new operators looked further back and landed on the name that predates all of it. The tasting room reopened in October 2025 as d'Ellena Winery & Vineyard, a direct nod to Claudio Ellena and his sons.
The winemaking itself changed hands too. Ryan Pedvin, who started his winemaking career in 2018, took over as head winemaker with a stated commitment to sourcing grapes exclusively from Rancho Cucamonga and Santa Barbara growers. The first releases under the new label include a red Zinfandel made from grapes grown at nearby Lopez Ranch and a white Zinfandel grown on d'Ellena's own restored vineyard rows, the same ground the Ellena family planted more than a century ago. Harvest-to-release timelines for those wines run six to 18 months, and the winery projected the first new vintages would reach the tasting room by early spring 2026, meaning the wine in your glass today is likely the first grown and made on that property in years.
The site also does something Filippi's tasting room never did: it doubles as a training ground. National CORE runs a program called CORE Academy out of d'Ellena, offering free workforce training in fields including hospitality and property management. A stop for a Saturday tasting is, at the same time, part of a local job pipeline.
A More Predictable Schedule
For residents who remember the old complaints about locked doors, the current setup is a noticeable change. When d'Ellena first reopened in October 2025, the tasting room ran Wednesday through Friday afternoons and Saturday through Sunday mornings into evening. Current posted hours have settled into something simpler: closed Monday and Tuesday, open Wednesday through Sunday from 1 to 8 p.m., with holiday closures limited to Thanksgiving and Christmas. Five consistent days beats a patchwork week, and it's a small but real signal that the new operation is building for regulars rather than the occasional lucky visitor.
Why This Particular Building Still Matters
Rancho Cucamonga's Cucamonga Valley once supported roughly 60 wineries. Today, historical markers around the city count five survivors, and d'Ellena is one of them. A short drive away in Mira Loma, Galleano Winery, founded in the 1930s, is another link to that same agricultural history, still pouring wines from a region most people now associate with warehouses and freeway interchanges rather than vineyards. The Pacific Electric Trail, the paved bike path built along the old Pacific Electric Railway right-of-way, runs close enough to the Baseline Road site that cyclists have long treated the winery as a natural rest stop, something the new operators inherited along with the buildings.
National CORE's stated plans for the property go beyond the tasting room: a pocket park, outdoor event space, and eventually a Cucamonga Valley wine history museum are part of the long-term vision for the site, according to the organization's public statements. None of that exists yet. What exists right now is a working tasting room, a small crew of restored vines, and a sign that finally matches the name of the family who broke ground there in 1916.
For residents who've spent years calling it Filippi's out of habit, that's worth knowing before your next drive down Baseline Road. The building didn't change. The wine in the glass is different, made by different hands, from grapes grown closer to home than what was in the bottle a few years ago. The name just finally caught up to the history that was always underneath it.
If you're curious what else has changed on the streets you drive every day, that's the kind of local detail Terri Barrett tracks closely, not because it moves a listing, but because knowing a neighborhood well means knowing what's actually happening in it.
