Old Vine Zinfandel and the Words on the Label

Pour Story Society · Grapes and Places · In the Glass

"Old vine" is one of the most trusted phrases on a wine label in America, and it has no legal meaning here at all. What it should mean, where Zinfandel came from before it was ours, and the Amador vineyard that has been growing it since at least 1869, with Joel Peterson, Scott Harvey and Greg La Follette on what it takes to work with vines that old.

Early in his career, Joel Peterson was driving a truck back from Dry Creek Valley with about four tons of grapes in the back when the truck tipped over in the middle of the road and spread the whole load across the pavement. In those years that was roughly a third of everything he had to make wine with. He told me about it this week in the same easy voice he used for everything else, how he and his crew scraped the grapes back up off the road, got them into bins and took them to the winery, and lost a bit along the way. Those were the early years, when Ravenswood was 375 cases of Zinfandel made in a borrowed corner of Joseph Swan's winery, and the fruit Joel was chasing came from vineyards that were already older than anyone working in them.

That fruit was not easy to come by, and most people who grew it at the time were selling it into jug wine, because nobody had yet made much of a case that a gnarled, low-yielding Zinfandel vine planted before the First World War was worth more than a young one. Fifty years later the case has been made so well that the two words "Old Vine" sit on the front of bottles in every grocery store in the country, and most of us reach for them the way we reach for "Reserve," assuming somebody somewhere has checked.

In the United States, nobody has, and the story of what those words ought to mean runs from a road in Dry Creek back through the Sierra foothills and the Gold Rush to a handful of stone villages on the Croatian coast.

What the label is allowed to mean

Picture yourself in the wine aisle holding two bottles of Zinfandel, both marked Old Vine, one at fourteen dollars and one at forty-five. The federal agency that approves American wine labels has rules for the grape variety, the vintage and the place name on each of them, but it has never defined "old vine," so the cheaper bottle could come from vines planted fifteen years ago and nobody would have broken a law. Most wineries that use the phrase use it honestly, and plenty of them are being modest about it, but the words by themselves only tell you that someone thought the vines were old enough to mention.

The places that took the question seriously tended to be the places that nearly lost their old vines. In Australia's Barossa Valley, where phylloxera never arrived and some Shiraz has been in the ground since the 1840s, a government vine-pull program in the 1980s paid growers to tear out old vineyards, and some of the oldest went. Yalumba drafted an Old Vine Charter in 2007 so it couldn't happen quietly again, and the regional growers took it up in 2009. It sorts vines by age the way a family might count generations, with Old Vines at 35 years, Survivor Vines at 70, Centenarians at 100 and Ancestors at 125, and the vineyards are recorded by age on a regional register. South Africa followed with a Certified Heritage Vineyards seal for vines 35 years and older, worn on the neck of the bottle and sometimes printed with the planting year.

California got its version the same way, from growers and winemakers who watched old vineyards being pulled out for something more productive. They formed the Historic Vineyard Society in 2011, and its registry admits a vineyard only if it is still producing wine, was first planted at least 50 years ago, and still has a third or more of its working vines traceable to that first planting. Close to 200 vineyards have qualified. It is a volunteer effort and it is voluntary, but it ties the word "old" to a real vineyard, a real date and a group of people who will check.

The grape that came from somewhere else

For most of the last century Zinfandel was sold to Americans as our own grape, the one wine variety with no European parent anybody could name, and a lot of American wine drinkers took a quiet, hometown kind of pride in that. The grape had reached nurseries on the East Coast in the early 1800s, mostly to be eaten off the vine, and it came west with the Gold Rush, where it took to the dry foothill heat better than nearly anything else the miners put in the ground.

Carole Meredith, a grapevine geneticist at UC Davis, spent the late 1990s proving otherwise, and she did it the old-fashioned way, on foot. She knew no one in the Croatian scientific community when she started, so she teamed up with Ivan Pejić and Edi Maletić of the University of Zagreb, and the three of them went up and down the Dalmatian coast taking samples from old vines, hundreds of them in all, with Ridge Vineyards helping pay for the search. In 2001 one of those samples matched. It was a nearly vanished red grape called Crljenak Kaštelanski, the red of Kaštela, from a string of seaside villages outside Split, and it had the same DNA as every Zinfandel vine in California. More digging turned up the grape's older Croatian name, Tribidrag, in records going back to the fifteenth century, and confirmed that Italy's Primitivo is the same variety carried across the Adriatic to Puglia.

Under American labeling rules a wine from this grape can now be called Zinfandel, Primitivo or Tribidrag. Dalmatian producers now bottle it under its old names again, and a Croatian Tribidrag poured next to an Amador Zinfandel makes one of the better tastings a curious drinker can set up at home, the same vine grown on two coasts for a century and a half.

Ten acres on the Shenandoah Valley floor

About five miles northeast of Plymouth, in Amador County, there is a vineyard of roughly ten acres that shows up as a descriptor on an 1869 land deed, which makes it the oldest documented Zinfandel vineyard in California. It goes by the Original Grandpère, and the families who planted it reportedly came west by wagon train. By late October the harvest is in and the leaves are going yellow and rust, and the vines look like what they are, something left over from another century. Each one stands on its own without wires or stakes, a thick, twisted trunk about knee high that splits into a handful of arms, so a row of them looks like a line of small gnarled figures holding up their hands. Growers call it head training, and it is how the rows were set out when they were worked with horses. Nobody waters them, and their roots have had more than 150 years to go looking for water on their own.

The vineyard has outlived a good deal. Phylloxera, the root louse that tore through California's vineyards in the 1880s, largely missed the Shenandoah Valley because it was so remote. Prohibition should have finished the place off, and instead grape acreage in Amador went up, since home winemaking stayed legal and Zinfandel's thick-skinned clusters survived the long rail trip east to the families making their own. The growers have their own version of how the old vines made it through those years, and Scott Harvey's labels credit what they politely call moonlit nights of unregulated distillation.

Only a handful of wineries buy fruit from those ten acres. Scott Harvey, who grew up in the foothills with a grandfather who owned vineyards in the Shenandoah Valley and worked his first harvest at Montevina in 1974, fifty-three harvests ago, bottles his as Vineyard 1869, and Vino Noceto, better known for its Sangiovese, labels its version OGP. The wines from old Amador vines tend to run against the jammy, high-octane reputation Zinfandel picked up in the 1990s. They show darker fruit, a bit of earth and spice, and tannins that are firm without being heavy, and the best of them carry the kind of savory edge that keeps a second glass interesting.

What the people who work these vines know

The registry can date a vineyard, but it can't tell you what it takes to make wine from one, and for that I went back to my own recordings. Every winemaker in my Meet the Winemakers oral history series answers the same twenty questions, and three of them had something to say about old vines and the old ways of working with them.

Joel Peterson started Ravenswood in 1976 with 375 cases of old-vine Zinfandel made in a corner of Joseph Swan's winery, and today he makes wine at Once & Future in the Sonoma Valley from some of the oldest vineyards in the state. When I asked him which decision he makes that he can't fully explain to anyone else, he went straight to an old field-blend vineyard at harvest. Those vineyards were planted the old way, mostly Zinfandel with a scattering of other black grapes mixed into the rows, and every variety ripens on its own schedule. "You can't just measure the sugar," he told me, so the call on when to pick comes from walking the rows and reading what he calls the gestalt of the vineyard, how the whole thing works together. He talks about the men who planted those sites as if they were colleagues, Agoston Haraszthy and William McPherson Hill among them. He never met them, but he works with what they left in the ground.

The wine Joel would pour for a stranger is his 1986 Old Hill Ranch Zinfandel, from vines planted around 1885, dry farmed, organic, and cropped in those years at about half a ton an acre, a fraction of what a modern vineyard gives. He described it as rambunctious and dark when it was young, the kind of wine some people would have sent back as too much, and said time turned it into something beautiful. Before the stranger tastes it, he said, he would ask them to enjoy a gem of California history.

Scott Harvey's answer to what a stranger needs to know about his wine was about ripeness. Too much wine today, he said, is made from overripe grapes, and raisins make wine that tastes like plums and raisins no matter where it was grown. He picks when the grapes are ripe and stops there, and he judges a finished blend by what he calls the first-bite experience. He takes a bottle of the blend home, he and Jana cook dinner with it, and if the next bite of food doesn't taste as fresh as the first, he goes back to the barrels and keeps blending. He still runs his own wet lab one test at a time and makes his wines by pH, a method he learned from Dr. Richard Peterson.

Greg La Follette, who came up under André Tchelistcheff at Beaulieu and now makes wine at Marchelle in Sebastopol, works mostly with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, but his answers belong in the same conversation. He still ferments in old open dairy tanks that have to be shoveled out by hand because he likes what they do for the wine, and he still keeps handshake agreements with growers he has worked with for decades. All three still do certain things the slow way because they believe the wine is better for it, and an old vineyard is about the slowest way there is to grow a grape.

Reading the bottle in your hand

The words "Old Vine" by themselves are a shrug, so the useful information is everything printed around them. A named vineyard is the first thing worth finding, because a winery willing to put a vineyard's name on the front is staking its reputation on a place you can look up. A planting year is better still, and the best old-vine producers print it on the back label without being asked. Words like dry farmed, head trained or own rooted are good signs too, since they describe how old California vineyards were actually planted and farmed, and a winery using them usually knows its vineyard well.

The Historic Vineyard Society keeps its registry online, searchable by county and decade, and it takes about a minute on a phone in the wine aisle to check whether a vineyard on a label is there. A vineyard missing from the list is not necessarily young, since the registry depends on owners and winemakers nominating their own sites, but one that appears on it has had its dates looked at by someone other than the marketing department.

Amador and the rest of the Sierra Foothills are the obvious place to start for anyone in Northern Nevada, a few hours from Reno over Carson Pass on Highway 88 or down Highway 50 through Placerville. Lodi has a deep bench of old vineyards and some of the best prices on them, and Sonoma County, Contra Costa County and Paso Robles all have historic Zinfandel sites still producing. For the other side of the family, a Primitivo from Puglia costs about what a weeknight bottle should, and a Croatian Tribidrag or Crljenak Kaštelanski from the Dalmatian coast is worth asking a good wine shop to order in.

By December the leaves will be down in the Shenandoah Valley, and sometime after the first of the year someone will walk out into those ten acres with a pair of pruning shears and start cutting back the same trunks that somebody was cutting back in 1869. It takes a long time to prune a vineyard like that, because every vine is shaped a little differently from the one beside it, and each one has to be studied for a moment before it is cut, the way it has been every winter for more than a century and a half.

The Bottle

Scott Harvey Vineyard 1869 Old Vine Zinfandel, Amador County

Grape	Zinfandel, usually with a small share of Barbera or Syrah depending on the vintage
Vineyard	Original Grandpère, Shenandoah Valley, documented 1869, dry farmed, head trained
In the glass	Blackberry, fig and pomegranate, a lift of violets, a little coffee and spice toward the finish
Body and grip	Medium-full body, firm tannin, alcohol kept moderate by design
At the table	Braised short ribs, sausages off the grill, a wood-fired pizza, an aged cheddar

My first old-vine Zinfandel came during Covid, at Cuvée Wine Cellars, an urban winery on an industrial block of San Carlos where Paul Rogerville makes wine from grapes grown in vineyards all over Northern California. It is one of my first memories of California wine, and the vines behind that glass were somewhere I had never been, so the name on the label was all I had to go on. Years later, Scott's Vineyard 1869 put a place and a date on what I had tasted that afternoon.