Cupertino's Wine Country
by Gail Fretwell-Hugger
Before Cupertino was really a town - when it had a blacksmith shop and a general store at the Crossroads and very little else - immigrants from France, Germany, Italy, and even overland from east of the Rocky Mountains came to California, not to search for gold, but to buy and settle and work the land. Land was gold.
Early Vineyards and a Blackberry Patch
The earliest vineyard in the Westside (Cupertino) was planted by one of the area’s first settlers, Captain Elisha Stephens – hunter, trapper, explorer and wagon master. After successfully guiding the Stephens-Murphy-Townsend party over the plains and high Sierras, Stephens settled along the creek that now bears his name and planted a small vineyard and a blackberry patch that became Blackberry Farm swim resort in much later years.
Vineyards in Cupertino’s Flatlands
Even before the Jesuits planted their vineyard, a German farmer, Henry Farr, bought 240 acres around 1868 at the intersection
of Prospect and Stelling roads. Farr called his ranch Grandview as it had a panoramic view of the Santa Clara Valley.
He planted grapes for Cabernet, Matero, Burger, Zinfandel and Reisling wines. In 1910, Henry sold his last piece of land to
Painless Parker, a San Francisco dentist with unorthodox marketing methods (present site – Parker Ranch Road).
One of the Westside’s most successful early wineries was owned by John T. Doyle (1814 – 1906), chief counsel to the
archdiocese of San Francisco. He had a beautiful mansion in Menlo Park but wanted a country estate as well. His property
extended from Foothill Boulevard to Orange Avenue in Monta Vista and from Stevens Creek Boulevard to McClellan Road.
He built two very large winery buildings (Cupertino Winery and Las Palmas) plus a large home, many outbuildings including
a Chinese hotel for workers, and another building he called the Palace Hotel. He had a dairy, large poultry yards,
huge four-story water tanks, and an elevated grass-lined, ¼ mile-long pipe to transport the wine from his eastern winery
to his western winery, across the same arroyo that De Anza and his soldiers traversed some 160 years before. Doyle had the
first post office on his property and used the name Cupertino, which replaced the name of Westside. His vines were sold on the
East Coast and in Europe and took second place in the 1904 Chicago World’s Fair. He dammed up sections of Stevens Creek for water
to process his grapes into wine, with pumping stations all along the creek. His water system was the basis for
Cupertino’s Municipal Water System in the later 1900s. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake damaged his extensive buildings,
and Doyle died later that year. His former summer home remained on McClellan Road until the 1960s while different Cupertino
city councils debated about preserving the buildings along with the property as a large park. Eventually, the land on which
the wineries and house stood on McClellan Road was sold to developers and the massive wine buildings and lovely old home disappeared.
A few miles down the road from Doyle’s western winery buildings was Richard Heney’s Chateau Ricardo on 280 acres (1884).
Heney raised Isabella, Tocay, Petit Syrah and Zinfandel grapes. His wines received medals at the Paris Exposition.