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Doing things the old way

What was once commonplace is now remarkable – the survival of field blend wines in Sonoma County

By CHRISTIAN KALLEN
Back in the day – and for several hundred years before that – winemakers would go out in the vineyards at the end of summer and pick whatever grapes were ripe, throw them in a barrel, stomp on them, sieve out the pips and put the juice aside. A few days, or weeks, or months later, there would be wine.

Today, if you drive along one of our wine country roads such as Eastside or Westside, Olivet or Arnold, you’ll see neatly tended vines in regimental rows, identical plants throwing down near-identical clusters of clonal replicants. The signs tell you: Cabernet Franc in this row, Syrah here, Dijon 667 over there. And the resulting wines – scientifically crushed, fermented, barreled and bottled – are often 100% the varietal they claim.

Over the centuries techniques were improved, of course, but it may be that something was lost, too. That 100% cab may have all the elements such a grape can deliver, but it may not be as rich and complex as a Bordeaux blend, with some cabernet franc for aroma, merlot for softness, petit verdot for color. While California winemakers create their meritage from separate vineyards, blending the grapes after fermentation to create their recipe for fine wine, there’s another way of attaining the same complexity in a wine – the field blend.

The field blend, if you think about it, is probably where it all came from in the first place: Mixed varieties of grapes growing in the same vineyard, harvested together, crushed together, and fermented together. After all, varietal identification of wine didn’t really get going until late in the Middle Ages, but winemaking itself is positively Neolithic.

While there are relatively few field blend wines on the market today, seeking them out is worth the effort, if only to tap into the stories of three of the area’s most intriguing wineries – the influential producer Ridge, historic local winemaker Seghesio, and Acorn Winery, the new kid on the bloc.

RIDGE LYTTON SPRINGS

In Sonoma County, the place to start would be the old vineyards planted by the Italian wine making community of the late 19th-early 20th century. A handful of these vineyards survive, usually in the Healdsburg-Geyserville-region. One of them is on the ridge at Lytton Springs, where 100-plus year old vineyards consistently produce what many regard as some of the best wines in the state. Winemaker John Olney of the Ridge Lytton Springs establishment took me on a walking tour of the vines just outside of the innovative straw bale tasting room, pointing out the different varietals.

“Most of these are zinfandel – when the early Italian winemakers planted their vineyards, zin was one of the main grapes they used,” he said. “But every ninth or tenth vine is a petite sirah, and there’s a few carignan in the vineyard, and some Grenache.” Olney doesn’t go so far as to say there was any mathematical formula in the planting of the vineyard, but he does suspect “there was a method behind the madness.”

“Every now and then you find one of these” – he bends down to pluck a deep red grape from a vine, and squeezes it open. The juice is a deep purple. “Alicante, one of the only grapes that actually has red juice. I think you’d want some of this in the blend if you wanted to deepen the color, since zinfandel can be a little pale sometimes.”

True, if you look at the label of any number of red wines, you’ll find the percentages of varietals that comprises the wine – 80% zinfandel, 12% petite sirah, 8% carignan. But the difference in usually that these grapes were harvested and fermented separately, sometimes even aged apart – and only blended together as the wine is aged in the barrel, or even later. “It seems these winemakers of a century ago were trying to get the wine blended in the vineyard,” Olney says. “And my experience is, if you co-ferment right off the bat you get a better result. The wine’s more integrated, the flavors more blended, the colors richer.”

Even though zinfandel is now a cult wine, and winemakers are falling over each other trying to come up with clever puns on the name, Ridge doesn’t even bother to call their wines “zinfandel” – though they usually contain well over the 75% of the grape required to use the varietal on the label. “We just call it Lytton Springs, or Geyserville, or York Creek. Everyone knows it’s zin.”

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Visit two other wineries with field blend wines, Seghesio Family Vineyards and Acorn Winery.

FIELD BLEND WINERIES

Ridge Vineyards / Lytton Springs
650 Lytton Springs Road
Healdsburg, CA 95448
(707) 433-7721
www.ridgewine.com
Tasting and sales: Daily,11-4.

Seghesio Family Vineyards
14730 Grove St. Healdsburg, CA 95448
(707)433-3579
seghesio.com
Tasting and sales: Daily, 10-5

Acorn Winery
12040 Old Redwood Highway
Healdsburg, CA 95448
Phone: 707-433-6440
Tasting and sales: By appointment only.
acornwinery.com

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