Three riffs on the Zinfandel grape

Five years ago, Julie Johnson, a 20-year veteran of Napa Valley winemaking and owner of 10 acres of 30-year-old Zinfandel grapevines in Rutherford, decided to turn winemaking tradition on its head. Many wineries make single-vineyard wines, and many growers sell fruit to more than one winery. Johnson’s idea was to bring in three winemakers to produce three Zinfandels from three sections of the vineyard under the same label: Tres Sabores. The wines are differentiated by the winemaker’s name on the label.

Johnson was among those who helped reinvent Napa Valley wine 20 years ago when she and husband John Williams co-founded Frog’s Leap Winery with their friend Larry Turley. She became sole proprietor of their Rutherford ranch vineyard when she and Williams divorced.

Close observers of the wine world believe that Johnson’s vision and energy were vital to the early and sustained success of Frog’s Leap. When she reentered the commercial fray with her wine label, she didn’t want it to be a cookie-cutter knockoff.

“I didn’t want to bring in an architect, a consultant who would say, ‘This is the way I do it and it will be one of the wines in my portfolio,’ ” Johnson said. “I wanted winemakers who were still asking, is it magic or mystery? I wanted them to approach the vineyard with a sense of discovery.”

Johnson hoped the wines would showcase aspects of the fruit from Williams Ranch. At a recent tasting, the character of the vineyard -- bright berry-ish flavors with an underlying tobacco-like earthiness -- showed in all three wines. Yet each is a completely different stylistic expression.

“All I told the winemakers was that I wanted them to discover the fruit and listen to what kind of wine it wanted to be,” Johnson said. “I had no idea they’d come up with such individual expressions. The best thing about this has been watching them become truly intuitive and responsive to the grapes.”

The winemakers she chose for the inaugural 1999 vintage were Karen Culler (Ladera Vineyards and the Culler label), Ken Bernards (Ancien Vineyards), and Rudy Zuidema (then at Robert Craig Winery and now at Ehlers Lane). That was the roster through the currently available 2001 vintage. For the 2002s, still in barrel, Bernards rotated out and was replaced by Ashley Heisey (Far Niente).

In tasting Tres Sabores from the 1999s through barrel samples of the 2002s, I found the winemakers’ signatures consistent despite vintage variations. Culler’s style is elegantly muscular, firm and supple -- Bordeaux-like in the long, sleek lines but similar in weight and power to a northern Rhone Syrah, all in the context of unmistakable Zin exuberance. Bernards’ wines are more old-style California -- bigger; more luscious, a gushing mouthful of sun-warmed raspberries and blackberries with more than a dash of black pepper. Zuidema’s wines somehow show blueberries in the nose regardless of vintage, and a bright, fresh crispness on the palate, with leaner tannin and more oak than the other two.

“We all brought our backgrounds to bear on the site,” Zuidema noted. “I come from a Cabernet background. Ken comes from the Pinot Noir camp, and Karen is more a Rhone Ranger. And all that shows in our wines.”

It’s too soon to gauge the finer points of Heisey’s 2002, but tasted out of barrel it appears to be yet another style -- this one more seductively round and full-bodied, a generous yet disciplined Zin.

Significantly, none of the Tres Sabores wines I tasted showed the heavy, implosive fruit and toxic alcohol levels of the Zin style currently in vogue. They were all wines that invited glass after glass with, perhaps, platters of tamales and grilled lamb chops.

The moment of Zin

That overarching food-friendly disposition is one of the things she likes about Zin, Johnson said. “It’s one of the things that convinced me about Zinfandel 20 years ago, when I was first selling Frog’s Leap wines.” It was in Santa Fe, N.M., she recalls, during an extensive wine-food pairing at Cafe Pasquale, that she realized the combination of bright acidity and berry-ish fruit made Zin compatible with the entire menu, while the other wines were limited. “The Sauvignon Blanc and Zin just cruised, while the Cabernet and Chardonnay got stuck,” she recalled. “The lights went on: I was a Zin fan.”

Johnson and Williams purchased the small ranch and vineyard in the Mayacamas foothills west of Rutherford, the Napa Valley’s viticultural epicenter in 1987. Their little house overlooked a landscape steeped in history, and the view included the Beaulieu and Niebaum estates. Their modest 10 acres of Zinfandel vines, planted in the 1970s, was part of Frog’s Leap’s successful Napa Valley Zin program.

The vineyard is on rising ground on the highest part of the famed Rutherford Bench, a long alluvial bank between the valley floor and the steep, rugged Mayacamas range. A meandering ravine snakes into the hills directly above the vineyard. It eventually connects with Bear Canyon, one of the major conduits through the Mayacamas for cool, moist air from the Pacific Ocean. So the property is kissed, at a distance, by the sea.

That may explain why the grapes, and the wines, are more restrained than the opulent intensity typical of many Napa Valley Zin vineyards. “It’s a different Zin vineyard,” Culler noted. “It’s not an extremely intense Zin. The flavors are more subtle and elegant.”

Zuidema agreed. “It’s not a big club-your-teeth-out Zin site -- it’s more Old World, with finesse and truer Zin character than that huge peppery, ripe, high-alcohol type of Zin. This is a subtle, finesse-style Zin, a food Zin. That’s what I like to drink, and what I like to make.”

Each winemaker has roughly one-third of the vineyard. Working closely with vineyard manager Pete Richmond, they make viticultural decisions that affect the character of the wine. The most important is when to pick. That’s a perpetual challenge because the fruit ripens at different rates where the soil is more gravelly than it does where there’s more clay, with the complicating factor of an uneven swale, probably an ancient streambed, that runs diagonally across the rows.

And each winemaker handles the fruit differently through fermentation and aging. Native yeast or inoculation? Punch down or pump over? French or American oak, new or seasoned? Every little touch amplifies the winemaker’s impression on the coalescing wine.

Each of the winemakers also contributes a few barrels for a blend called Porque No? (Why not?), which includes a touch of Cabernet Sauvignon from vines Johnson planted recently. She is also going to revive one of the ranch’s historic varietals by planting Petite Sirah, which grew there in the 19th century. And she’s planting pomegranate trees.

So more projects may yet emerge from this bountiful property. Johnson says she will reevaluate Tres Sabores after the 2004 vintage. By then, she will know the vineyard inside-out and may want to display its many aspects in a new way. The overarching concept of the label allows for unlimited creativity, because Tres Sabores also refers to the three elements of wine: terroir, grape variety and winemaker.

She may go in any direction -- one magnificent blend or a dozen distinctive small cuvees showing off micro-facets of the vineyard. Porque no?