WINE: ESTHER MOBLEY ASKS: WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH OLD VINES?
It seems age has its rewards, even in the vineyard
Wines can get better with age. Do vineyards?
The term “old vine” is one of the last unregulated terms that you’re likely to see on a wine label. Though I’ve never found an example of blatant misuse — no one is slapping “old vine” on a vineyard they planted last Tuesday — “old” is nevertheless relative. A label that says “old vine” could equally refer to 30-year-old vines (especially in a younger wine region) or to 150-year-old vines. So how old is old?
Justice Potter Stewart’s famous axiom holds up here. “I know it when I see it,” laughs Mike Officer, owner of the 89-year-old Carlisle Vineyard in the Russian River Valley and a co-founder of the Historic Vineyard Society, which keeps a registry of old vineyards. He’s right. Vines of a certain age look almost like a different plant species — not only because of their gnarled shapes and enormous girth (like a tree, a vine’s diameter increases with age), but also because vineyards were laid out quite differently a century ago. You won’t see those familiar tight, uniform rows of trellises, but rather erratic fields of heterogeneous, twisted growths, sparsely scattered, held up not by wires or stakes but by their own contorted mass. Bulbous, surreal and menacing, they call to mind Snow White’s haunted forest.
But the more interesting question than what’s old is whether, and in what ways, a vine’s age determines wine quality.
“I don’t know if we can say that old vines are better,” says Tegan Passalacqua, who makes wine from old vines for Turley Wine Cellars and Sandlands. “But I think they’re more stable.”
Young vines, like young people, are often vigorous to a fault. “They set more fruit than they can ripen,” Passalacqua says. As they age, vines learn to selfregulate. Yields come into balance, and grapes ripen more evenly. Older vines often produce smaller berries, which can lead to more structured wines; there’s a greater ratio of tannin-packed skin to juice.
That many of California’s old vines have always been dry farmed (irrigation was not a thing in the 19th century) amplifies their extreme root depths. “Underground is where you get all these flavor complexities, all the microbial activity,” says Bill Easton, of Terre Rouge and Easton Wines in Amador County. Because of these deep roots, “older vines are just greater translators of that complexity.”
Vague terms like “concentrated” and “intense” get thrown around a lot, sometimes attributed to old vines’ low yields. Like an older person, the analogy holds, an old vine speaks less, but chooses its words more wisely. On one hand, that may be a function of the yield balance that Passalacqua mentions; on the other hand, these lower yields may be a sign of general decay. “I work with a vineyard planted in the 1880s,” says Daniel Roberts, a vineyard consultant based in Sonoma County. “And the vines are as dead as they are alive.”
Is it worth keeping them on life support? Is the fruit delicious enough to justify what may be an economically un- tenable situation? Some say no. Everyone agrees that vines are no good in their earliest infancy. “When a vine is young, it doesn’t really have an established root system,” says Roberts. “It takes about four years to get the vine to ripen evenly.” After that, Roberts does not believe that a vine’s age is a strong indicator of wine quality.
“When I taste blind, I can’t tell a difference between old and young vines,” he says. “I’m not saying they’re wrong, but I haven’t seen it.”
You can’t haul a tractor through many of these 100year-old vineyards; farming must be done by hand. “It’s very difficult to farm these vines,” says Joe Shebl of Amador’s Renwood Winery. “It costs you maybe $5,000 to farm a ton of fruit, and then you can sell it for maybe $2,000, and that just doesn’t make sense.” Shebl makes wine from several old vineyards in Amador, including Jack Rabbit Flat, over 100 years old.
And consumers won’t always pay more for old-vine wines. Most of California’s old vines are Zinfandel, not bigbuck designer grapes like Cabernet or Chardonnay. Can you charge enough for a bottle of old-vine Zin to recoup the farming costs? Shebl thinks not: “I think for most people, the upper level for Zin is about $35 a bottle.” Martinelli Winery charges $125 for its Jackass Hill Zinfandel, planted in the 1890s, and “that probably still doesn’t reflect the cost of farming,” says Julianna Martinelli.
Indeed, this sense that the preservation of old vines is rooted in an indulgent senti- mentality, cost be damned, makes the old-vine conversation frustrating. Old vines can make great wine, but so can young vines, and neither can be said to categorically always make great wines. How can we continue to make proclamations about “old” and “young” when we can’t even agree on what constitutes “old” in the first place?
To my surprise, when I put a version of this question to Officer, he gave a wonderfully scientific response. About 10 percent of the vines in the Carlisle Vineyard were unproductive when he purchased it, he said. He removed the dead vines and planted new ones. The young vines are farmed exactly as the old vines, and in fact grew from budwood taken from the old vines. So it at least approximates a controlled experiment, with vine age the only variable.
“And yet when we have picked the young vines separate from the old vines, the juice chemistries are very different,” Officer says. The young vines often have one component sticking out — high potassium levels, or excessively low acidity. “We find that in the old-vine juice, the brix, pH, potassium, nitrogen, are just in harmony.” In other words — to use another vague term — they’re balanced.
Potassium levels, root depths, fruit yields — this conversation can start to sound a little wonky, even to me. At the end of the day, all that matters is whether the wine tastes good, right?
Maybe not. To some winemakers and growers, old vineyards have another value that’s distinct from how they translate to wine. They’re historic artifacts. They’re libraries — genetic repositories — of grape varieties otherwise near extinction here. Try to find Muscadelle or Grand Noir or Aramon anywhere in California except haphazardly interplanted among old Zin.
“These vineyards capture a way of farming that is no longer done,” says Officer. Widely spaced, dry farmed, head pruned, they speak of a pre-industrial — maybe even, to some degree, pre-financial — era in California viticulture. For those who seek to intervene less in the vineyard, these old sites are a time machine back to the Golden Age. Maybe that’s enough.
“I don’t know if we can say that old vines are better, but I think they’re more stable.”
Winemaker Tegan Passalacqua