Family Tradition: 100 Years of Seghesio Zinfandel

The couple in the 1893 photograph looks a little uncomfortable. Edoardo Seghesio and his teenage bride, Angela Vasconi, are barely holding hands, and they’re not looking at each other. What are they thinking?

Does Angela resent that her uncle, Edoardo’s boss at Italian Swiss Colony Winery, pushed her into the marriage in order to keep Edoardo from returning to Italy? Does Edoardo regret letting Luigi Vasconi talk him into staying in Sonoma County to marry Angela?

We can only speculate. But by all accounts, Edoardo and Angela became close and had a good life together. For 40 years they lived with their five children in a big house just north of Geyserville, near the train stop for a now-vanished town called Chianti. In 1895 they used the money that Edoardo had saved up for his return to Italy to buy a 56-acre vineyard, which Edoardo planted with Zinfandel. And in 1902 they built their own winery nearby.

Almost a century later, their descendants are producing some of California’s finest wines. “Marrying the boss’ niece was a good career move for Grandpa,” says Ed Seghesio with a chuckle. He’s Edoardo’s grandson and one of the current proprietors of Seghesio Family Vineyards.

The Seghesios’ 400 acres of vines in Alexander Valley, Dry Creek Valley and Russian River Valley embrace some of the most venerable plantings in Sonoma County (including the oldest Sangiovese vines in America, planted by Edoardo in 1910). They have been making Zinfandel continuously since 1902, longer than any other producer in Sonoma County--probably any in California.

Ed lives in Healdsburg next to the “new” Seghesio winery, purchased in 1949. His son, Ted, makes the wines, and his son-in-law, Jim Neumiller, is the vineyard manager. Ed’s uncle, Peter, is the marketing man. Peter’s son, Pete Jr., is the general manager, Pete’s wife, Cathy, is in charge of sales, and ... you get the picture. In this case, “family” is not a euphemism for “corporation.” “Seghesio Family” means the Seghesio family; it’s hard for an outsider to keep track of who’s related to whom, but there seems to be a Seghesio in every phase of the operation.

Bulk wine was the name of the Seghesio game for 80 years. Peter Seghesio, the youngest son of Edoardo and Angela, produced the wine in large volumes--two flavors, red and white--and sold it by the tank-load to large wineries such as Italian Swiss Colony, Gallo and Paul Masson. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that Edoardo and Angela’s great-grandson, Ted Seghesio, studied winemaking at UC Davis with the intent of bottling wine under the family name. The first commercial Seghesio wines were introduced in 1983. Shortly thereafter Pete Jr. completed his degree in finance and joined the business as general manager.

Unfortunately, the wines they bottled under their own label--same flavors, but this time with names like Chenin Blanc, French Colombard and Sonoma Red--weren’t a great improvement over the bulk product, while being much more expensive to produce and market. “We were trapped in the past,” Pete Jr. now says.

Financial crisis loomed. They turned to several top consultants, including viticulturist Phil Freese and financial analyst Mike Fisher, and weighed their options. They had to get out of the cheap varietal twilight zone. But should they grow into a mega-winery, which would require a huge investment and possibly compromise family ownership? Or should they retrench and focus on quality?

Youthful energy ruled--in the mid-1990s Edoardo’s descendants made another radical change. They did what businesses aren’t supposed to do: they un-expanded. They cut production nearly 75% (from 128,000 cases to just 35,000) and abandoned the increasingly competitive “fighting varietal” market to focus primarily on their strongest assets: old Zinfandel and Sangiovese vines. At the same time, they planted Pinot Noir and several Italian varieties, including Pinot Grigio, Arneis and Barbera.

And in order to do justice to their outstanding vineyards, they refurbished the old winery. The huge redwood fermentation tanks gave way to temperature-controlled stainless-steel fermenters, including rows of small open-top vats suitable for handling individual lots of grapes picked at just the right moment. Several Australian-style rotary fermenters were installed. And a new climate-regulated cellar was filled with hundreds of small oak barrels--shockingly expensive, but indispensable for producing top-quality wines.

Current production is back up to about 70,000 cases, but with new emphasis on upscale, vineyard-driven bottlings. As planned, the roster is dominated by Zinfandels and Sangioveses.

More than half their acreage is dedicated to California’s signature grape, including some of the very vines planted by Edoardo Seghesio in 1895. The five Zin bottlings--Home Ranch (Alexander Valley), San Lorenzo Vineyard (Alexander Valley), Cortina (Dry Creek Valley), Sonoma County (Alexander and Dry Creek Valleys) and Old Vines (Alexander and Dry Creek Valleys)--showcase wonderful fruit in Ted Seghesio’s distinctive style, balancing concentration with purity, lusciousness with definition. These are focused and polished Zins that retain an earthy, rustic character true to their heritage.

Each of the five 2000 bottlings expresses a distinctive facet of Sonoma County Zin--the regal richness of the Home Ranch (from the 1895 planting); the mouth-filling black fruit jam character of the Old Vines (from head-trained vines averaging 90 years old); the spicy perfume and deep, earthy flavor of the San Lorenzo (from vines planted around 1890 and acquired by the family when Pete Sr. married Rachel Ann Passalacqua in 1956); the stone-inflected, spiced berry savor of the Cortina; and the succulent ripeness of the Sonoma County.

And then there’s Sangiovese. Without realizing it, Edoardo Seghesio bequeathed a real treasure to his family: four superb 19th century selections of Sangiovese imported directly from Italy. They were part of a 10-acre vineyard near the Chianti, Calif., train station that Seghesio planted in roughly the same field blend as a Tuscan vineyard: 85% Sangiovese, 10% Canaiola Nero (for color) and 5% white grapes, Malvasia and Trebbiano (for bright fruit and acidity).

During Prohibition, 80% of that Chianti Station vineyard was destroyed. But in 1981, with the prospect of launching the first commercial Seghesio label, Ted Seghesio brought the legendary UC Davis viticulturist Harold Olmo to identify the Sangiovese vines and choose a dozen of the healthiest plants to use for propagation. Two years later, more than 70 years after the vineyard was planted, Ted bottled the first commercial Seghesio “Chianti Station” Sangiovese.

Ed Seghesio subsequently took cuttings from those 12 vines to plant 15 acres of Sangiovese at the Home Ranch. That planting yielded its first wine in 1991.

A few years later the family called in more vine experts for a closer look at the Sangiovese vines. They determined that there were four distinct clones and chose the one with the smallest, most flavor-packed grapes to plant on Rattlesnake Hill, the steepest portion of the Home Ranch. Their Italian wine consultant, Alberto Antonini, believes that this clone is one of the piccolo or small-berry selections that have all but disappeared from Italian vineyards over the years.

The remarkable fruit of the last remaining plot of Edoardo Seghesio’s original planting can be tasted in the wonderfully concentrated 1998 Seghesio “Chianti Station” and 1999 Sangiovese. Both wines show not only a lovely purity of fruit but also the succulent sour cherry flavor that is so typical of Chiantis and Brunellos but is so seldom evident in the fatter, more extracted wines typical of the varietal in California.

That character is amplified to an exquisite level in “Venom” ’99, the first wine from the Rattlesnake Hill plot of piccolo clone vines. It’s the finest New World Sangiovese I’ve tasted, and it stands with the best of Tuscany. Here is a splendid marriage--not just of clone and site, but of cultures. This 19th century Italian immigrant is perfectly at home in California.

Smith is writer-at-large for Wine & Spirits Magazine.