San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Winery gets creative to save part of 119-year-old vineyard
The Rossi Vineyard is one of the oldest existing vineyards in Napa Valley, dotted with huge, craggy grapevines that were planted in 1905. Recently, it looked as if the construction of an entertainment executive’s new mansion was going to destroy some of these historic relics.
But Rossi’s caretaker, Spottswoode Winery, came up with an ingenious solution: hire a landscaping company to uproot the imperiled old vines and replant them in a different section of the property. This sort of old-vine rescue mission is rare nowadays, especially in Napa Valley, where the economic pressure to replace senile, lowyielding grapevines with younger, more productive ones is especially potent.
Best known as the source of Sean Thackrey’s Orion red blend, the Rossi Vineyard is a tiny site — under 5 acres — near downtown St. Helena. (It’s not to be confused with Rossi Ranch, another historic vineyard in Sonoma Valley.) As with many vineyards of its era, the varietal composition at Rossi is a hodgepodge: mostly Petite Sirah and an obscure grape called Peloursin, with scatterings of Alicante Bouschet, Syrah, Mourvedre, Carignan and others.
When Joe Berchtold, the CEO of LiveNation, bought the property a few years ago, he needed some farming help. “Joe had been buying our wines for years,” said Spottswoode owner Beth Novak, whose winery is located just a few steps down the road. “So we came up with a creative way to lease it. We farm it, and he gets paid in wine.”
In 2021, when Spottswoode’s crew arrived, Rossi was not in great shape. “It had been somewhat neglected for quite a while,” said Aron Weinkauf, Spottswoode’s winemaker and vineyard manager. He introduced organic farming practices, shifting it away from synthetic herbicides, and tried to improve the yields — not an easy task, especially in drought years, for centuryplus-old vines that have never been irrigated.
Meanwhile, Berchtold was preparing to build a 14,400-square-foot home, which drew “fierce opposition from neighbors and heavy skepticism from the St. Helena Planning Commission,” according to the St. Helena Star. The architectural plans overlapped with part of the vineyard, a point of particular controversy in a community that prizes the preservation of agricultural land.
“Most people in Joe’s position would have just come in and said, ‘I’m going to rip out the old vines,’” said Novak.
Weinkauf had an idea. Could the vines be transplanted? He looked into renting a tree spade, a large piece of equipment used to transplant mature trees, but said he discovered that there wasn’t such a rental company “anywhere west of the Mississippi.” Then he called a local business, Dexter Landscaping, which specializes in decorative home gardens. If they could move a tree from one location to another, why not a grapevine?
“We told Joe that it might be something that would look good on his behalf,” Weinkauf said.
So earlier this month, Dexter’s crew drove into Rossi with its tractor-like tree spades and, one by one, lifted the vines out of the ground, guided them over to areas of the vineyard with open space and plopped the plants into holes in the ground. The conditions were perfect, Weinkauf said, with lightly damp soil. In all, they moved about 180 vines over the course of several days.
It’s too soon to tell whether the vines will thrive in their new homes, but “if we have 85% take, that’s going to feel like an achievement,” said Weinkauf.
Nothing about the Rossi project makes financial sense. The yields are miniscule. Because it is zoned for a residence, the land is more valuable than other old vineyard sites. “To buy it just as vineyard land would have been a fool’s errand,” said Novak, who estimated the land is worth roughly $1 million per acre.
Most of the wine that Weinkauf makes from the vines will be returned to Berchtold as lease payment; as of the 2022 vintage, a small amount of the red blend will be sold to Spottswoode’s mailing list under the winery’s Field Book label.
“It has such tremendous concentration,” said Weinkauf of the wine. “It really is such a unique little beast.”