Gamay’s tangled path here at home

On a trip last year to the Sierra foothills, I noticed a bundle of budwood sticks sitting outside Ron Mansfield’s office.

Mansfield is the vineyard guru of El Dorado County, and new vines show up at vineyardists’ offices all the time. But these were Gamay Noir, the grape of Beaujolais. Not a common sight at all, and certainly not in a town like Placerville.

Except, of course, that Placerville and nearby Camino have become ground zero for this particular grape in California.

This is largely due to Mansfield, who has led the Sierra on quite literally fruitful bouts of planting in recent years. On Gamay, Mansfield’s partner in vine has been Steve Edmunds of Berkeley’s Edmunds St. John winery, who first floated the idea on a trip to Paso Robles.

Originally, the plan for Bob Witters’ vineyard was

“People who knew me really well said, ‘You must have lost your mind.’ ” Steve Edmunds

Pinot Gris (which also was planted), but at 3,400 feet, with rare granite soils that were analogous to Beaujolais’ own rare soils, the two had something else on the brain.

Four acres of vines were grafted in 2000; by 2002, Edmunds’ Bone-Jolly, presumably the first true Gamay Noir in California, had its first harvest.

“People who knew me really well said, ‘You must have lost your mind,’ ” Edmunds recalls.

The Witters planting was a fun little sideshow until a few years ago. Then the Barsotti family, whose nearby orchards feed their juiceprocessing business, acceded to Mansfield’s idea to plant more Gamay Noir.

Are you, I asked Mansfield at the time, the Gamay mogul of California?

He laughed. “I was just hoping Steve could make a wine that would take off, because nobody was doing it.”