Layne’s Wine Gig Presents
OLD VINES
By Layne V. Witherell
So, you own a lovely old winery and from your porch you can gaze daily at your 30-year-old vineyard. This is nice. What isn’t nice is that at 30 years of age vines decrease in productivity. This not only worries you, but it also worries your banker. You can do several things:
- Grub it all up and plant all over (mild heart palpitations for your banker).
- Let one third get older, replant one third, and let one third go fallow. A common practice in Bordeaux is to make “Grand Vin de Bordeaux”- the blenders paradise.
- You can intersperse plantings of younger vines for youth and vigor.
Or today, you can let the vines age and add an older vineyard to make an “Old Vine” wine. Old vine wines are a hot thing for several reasons: first, they are better in flavor and complexity than your 30-year vines. They tend to be more interesting because of the extra care taken with both vineyards and winemaking. Nothing quite like grubbing around with a hoe.
A Word of Caution on Old Vine Wines:
There is no legal definition of old vine, but the accepted notion is a pre-1967 planting. Know the producer or look at the winery tech sheet, the rest is marketing dribble if it just says “old vine” on a label.
You can buy into the “old vine industrial complex” by joining the Historic Vineyard Society, Old Vine Registry, or The Old Vine Hero Award, Old Vine Conference or Global Old Vine Tours. Start by reading Randy Caparoso’s book on the Lodi region in California, $60.00. (Lodi is sort of the Sierra Redwoods of old vine Zinfandel.) There are lots of people out there promoting old vine culture, their own websites, and consulting gigs.
SCOTTO OLD VINE ZINFANDEL, LODI, 2020 $12.00-$15.00 bottle.
This is a delicious burger on the grill old vine zinfandel. Smooth, tasty, complex. Ketchup and onions stuff. The irony of Lodi, apart from the John Fogarty “Lost in Lodi Again” song is that the land is cheap and plentiful. Their grapes fueled the White Zinfandel craze that was all about quantity over quality. Today, they represent some of the best values anywhere. There are a handful of 135-year-old vines in Lodi that won’t be going for over $12.00 a bottle! Lodi Zins can be notoriously high in alcohol (15% plus), but today with earlier picking they are calming them down.
FIELD BLENDS – The Old Days
The federal law is that to state a grape variety name on a label (say Zin) there must be 75% of that grape in the bottle. In the 1950’s it was 51%. But when many of these grapes were planted in the 19th century, the older Italians living in Lodi and Sonoma just wanted to have some wine for dinner. They interspersed many different grape plantings in what are called field blends. I have been fortunate to have tasted many of these wines while a college student at San Francisco State in the 1970’s. There are a handful of people still around who tasted them and can attest to their brilliance. Your one stop source is “Zinfandel: A History of a Grape and It’s Wine,” by Charles Sullivan.
OVR: OLD VINE RED Lot #74, Marietta Winery, Geyserville, Calif. $15.00-$20.00 bottle.
A classic replication of old school California field blends started by the Bilbro family in an old dairy barn in Geyserville in the late 1970’s. There was no chasing the illusive 100-point Cabernet score here, nor the mass marketed, Snoop Dogg, sweet red world. They have always made an honest “Tuesday night wine” from Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, and Carignane – classics of the old Italian field blend winemakers.
This bottling is complex and steak on the grill worthy. They blend different lots of grapes and old vine vineyards for current drinkability. They are currently experimenting with Italian varietals such as Barbara and Nero d’Avola. Their longstanding contracts and grower loyalty ensure a brilliant drinking wine.
BONESHAKER ZINFANDEL OLD VINES, LODI, 2020, $20.00 bottle.
WHEW! What a difference a place makes. While Scotto is a burger friendly Zin, this is the wild boar on a spit wine. Made by the Hahn Winery as their first excursion into Lodi, this is as full throttle a Zinfandel as can be imagined. Fruit, acid, tannin are all in place just sinfully amped. It all comes down to yield per acre and this one must be miniscule. At half a ton per acre you get one barrel or 25 cases of wine. It’s good that they also own all those Central Coast vineyards averaging six or so tons each to pay the bills. This is the kind of old vine Zin that is a labor of love.
OLD VINE WINES ARE A THING:
You just thought while looking at your vineyard that old vines were a Lodi or a mostly Sonoma thing. The competition that Randy Caparoso won with his book on Lodi was international. Australia, France, South Africa, Slovenia, Italy, Greece, they are everywhere. You just must root around those field blend, out of the way vineyards to find them.
I hate to do this to you but due to our archaic wine shipping laws in America this is the old vine wine you can’t buy unless you go to London. Bring me a bottle back if you find one.
DOMAINE JONES, FITOU, FRANCE, around $25.00 a bottle with erratic delivery times. Available in six packs.
Katie Jones worked in the wine biz for some decades then decided to buy an ancient vineyard in the Fitou region in Languedoc in the South of France. There she is hoe in hand grubbing through the Carignan, Hairy Grenache (I am not making this up), Syrah, Grenache Blanc, all those Southern French grapes.
What makes her different is that at Domaine Jones you can adopt an old vine complete with a certificate and your name on it. The vineyards are small, and both harvested and vinified separately. Difficult painstaking work. You can scroll through her website and choose your vine to adopt. Recently available are Edgar, Florian, Jean-Francois, etc. Kind of like the pet store of ancient vines.
Old vine wines are having a moment. They offer fascinating examples of handmade work in an increasingly industrialized world. They are worth your attention.
LABELS: or How to identify old vine wines
- California: Old vines or ancient vines.
- France: Vielles Vignes.
- Germany: Alte Reben.
- Alsace: Old Vines.
Check the Old Vine Registry for the most complete global database for old vines.
