Delving Deep Into the Mysteries of Zinfandel

Zinfandel is the true wine lover’s wine. It’s at once the most accessible and mysterious of all California varietals.

On one hand, Zin is simply delicious. No sophistication or intellectual effort is required on the drinker’s part; the left brain need not apply.

On the other hand, Zin can be profoundly complex, layered with nuances of fruit and terroir , compelling at the deepest sensual level. The grape has a marvelous capacity for capturing the essence of a particular vineyard site.

Knowing something about a particular Zin’s provenance can add a lot to the experience of slurping it down. And one of the first things that strikes an attentive palate is the seemingly endless array of single-vineyard Zins.

The proliferation of single-site bottlings is relatively new--it only began about 30 years ago--yet it reflects about 150 years of viticultural evolution. The origins of Zin are still sketchy, but apparently it was first planted in Sonoma Valley during the late 19th century and quickly spread throughout the Northern California wine country. Generations of vines adapted to their sites, and a rich genetic complexity developed as outstanding vineyards gave budwood for new plantings.

Some of the old Zin plant material has been passed through generations of families. The Seghesio family, for example, has propagated vineyards throughout Sonoma County from the original 1895 Eduardo Seghesio vineyard in Alexander Valley. That vineyard still yields wonderful wines such as Seghesio’s “Home Ranch” Zinfandel ‘99, a luscious, velvety fruit compote of a Zin.

Other old lineages have been lost and rediscovered. Dry Creek Valley grower Duff Bevill and several fellow growers rescued one such selection from the brink of extinction. The old Mazoni vineyard no longer exists, but the cuttings they took before it was ripped out have established the Mazoni selection in several vineyards. Its dark, peppery character can be tasted in the Deux Amis “Rued Vineyard” ’97, to choose one example.

Deux Amis partner Phyllis Zouzounis is a longtime Dry Creek Valley winemaker. She makes three distinctive Zins under the Deux Amis label (with co-proprietor and longtime winemaking colleague Jim Pempraze) and five more as winemaker at Mazzocco Vineyards.

“Zin shows the vineyard more than any other variety,” Zouzounis said. “It just reflects where it is. You can take budwood from Cuneo-Saini and plant it next door and get a very different wine. The clusters are different, berry sizes are different, and they give different flavors. It’s wild. Zin has as many reflections as people have personalities.”

That’s demonstrated by two of Mazzocco’s 1997 single-vineyard Dry Creek Valley Zins (just now coming into the market, due to Zouzounis’ policy of keeping big Zins back for extra bottle age before release). They come from the Cuneo-Saini and Quinn vineyards, which are situated next to each other on the east side of Dry Creek Valley. The sites share a general soil type (well-drained volcanic benchland) and climate (very warm, with a touch of refreshing marine influence). They also have the old plant material in common.

The Cuneo-Saini vineyard was planted in the late 1920s. The soil is a fairly heavy red-clay loam, and the old head-trained vines give a concentrated, complex Zin with black-fruit depths and sinuous tannin. The neighboring Quinn Vineyard was propagated from the Cuneo-Saini vines in the late 1980s. The combination of younger vines and a lighter, dustier version of the red volcanic soil gives a Zin that is typically brighter and jammier, with more raspberry and red cherry character than the wines from next door.

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The idea that clusters of Zinfandel vineyards develop family traits is furthered by Cline Cellars’ 1999 vineyard-designated Zins from the delta country northeast of San Francisco. If these wines were people, they’d be considered a different tribe from their Sonoma County counterparts.

Matt Cline specializes in Zin from old vines growing in deep sandy soil deposited over time by the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, where they flow together to join upper San Francisco Bay. The vines in the Big Break, Live Oak and Bridgehead vineyards were planted a century ago by Portuguese and Italian immigrants. “They were called sand-lappers,” Cline told me, “which tells you how strong the afternoon wind gets there.”

The sand is a creeping menace. Abandoned vineyards in that part of the world resemble deserts with thin leafy tendrils poking out of the ground, some forlornly holding small bunches of grapes. But in the early 21st century, Cline is less worried about the sand than he is about the proliferating tract houses that threaten to envelop and bury the old plantings permanently.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the Big Break, Live Oak and Bridgehead vineyards is that they comprise the largest concentration of Zinfandel vines growing on their own roots; because phylloxera doesn’t move through sand, the delta vines never had to be grafted on resistant rootstock. There’s no scientific proof that ungrafted vines yield truer or more intense fruit, but prevailing wisdom holds that they do. It may explain the surprising fact that the grapes retain firm acidity even when extremely ripe.

In any case, the three Cline bottlings from those three plantings (probably part of a single vineyard at one time) are truly intense. They share a succulent juiciness and fat berry flavors, like stuffing a handful of warm, juicy, slightly dusty blackberries and raspberries into your mouth.

The Big Break typically shows a minty inflection, which Cline says comes from the century-old eucalyptus trees along the block’s perimeter. The Live Oak is a marginally bigger wine, with sturdier tannin and deeper tones of tobacco and chocolate. The slightly loamier soil in the Bridgehead block yields the most elegant, defined Zin of the three.

These few examples of distinctive statements only begin to illustrate how Zinfandel embodies the classical tradition of site-expressive wine--embracing not just the soil-climate-aspect matrix of terroir but also the cultural elements of genetic selection, and site-specific cultivation and winemaking.

The pure sensual pleasures of Zin are immediate and lasting. That’s why the old-timers embraced it. But for anyone with a corkscrew and a sense of adventure, there’s much more to it than that.

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