Vintners preserve ancient Zinfandel vineyards.
In Russian River Valley, vintners rally to preserve a bastion of ancient Zinfandel
Mike Officer had seen this story before, and he knew how it usually ended.
Some old Zinfandel vines were about to be ripped out. These weren’t just any Zinfandel vines. This was Papera Ranch, a historic vineyard planted in 1934 at the corner of Santa Rosa’s Piner and Olivet roads. Papera’s devoted longtime caretaker, Tom Feeney, had died; in 2006, Feeney’s son sold the vineyard to a private real estate investment fund, ready to realize the plot’s full financial potential.
“They were all set to tear out the Zin and plant Pinot Noir at Papera,” Officer says. “Because this is Russian River Valley, and Pinot Noir is what should be planted here, according to the pencil pushers.”
Officer is the owner of the Carlisle Vineyard, a 90-yearold Zinfandel site just down the road from Papera. He’s become something of an evangelist for the area’s old-vine vineyards.
This little neighborhood — some call it Piner-Olivet, for its main arteries — stands apart from the rest of the Pinot Noirdominated Russian River Valley: Cooler and breezier than vineyards abutting the river along Westside and Eastside roads, Piner-Olivet was historically a stronghold for Zinfandel. In the late 19th century, it was settled by a group of families — the Pellettis, the Montafis, the Mancinis, the Barbieris, et al. — from a small town called San Pellegrinetto in the Italian province of Lucca.
Mike Officer believes these Italians’ now-ancient vineyards are treasures, and has tried over and over again to save these historic plots of land from dual threats: Santa Rosa residential development, and the Russian River cash crop — Pinot Noir.
The Barbieri Vineyard was rechristened as Pinot. Houses are being built where the old Gum Tree Ranch once stood. But Officer wasn’t going to let Papera go without a fight. The ranch was too precious an artifact, too perfect a site for Zinfandel. Its vines, though elderly, are remarkably healthy. The wines it yields — from wineries including Carlisle, Williams Selyem, Bedrock and Novy — are extraordinary, and baldly contradict any popular notions of Zinfandel as jammy and hot. Papera Zins, rather, are juicy and floral, elegant and bright, spicy and complex. It is one of California’s great vineyards.
In the 11th hour, Officer managed to salvage Papera. A Palo Alto-based angel investor — and wine lover — named Stuart Coulson had contacted him, expressing interest in getting into the wine industry. “I called him back,” Officer says. “And told him: ‘You could save one of the great old-vine vineyards of the Russian River Valley.’ ” Coulson loved the idea. He acted quickly. The all-cash deal closed with a two-week escrow.
“To me, it’s like having a beautiful work of art, or a historic building, and people just want to get rid of it,” says Officer, who is a co-founder of the Historic Vineyard Society. “I have to do what’s right.”
Now, happily for Officer, a new era is dawning on PinerOlivet. After a series of defeats for the historic plantings, some new vintners have recently purchased properties in the area and made clear their commitment to upholding PinerOlivet’s viticultural legacy.
The owner of Pinot Noir legend Williams Selyem, John Dyson, bought the Saitone vineyard last summer. A young upstart named Max Reichwage bought the historic Mancini Ranch. Zinfandel powerhouse Seghesio acquired Montafi. Beyond Piner-Olivet, but in its same spirit, winemaker Jesse Katz bought the old Ponzo property, a little ways north in the Russian River Valley.
When asked what their plans are for these properties, these newcomers all voice the same, unequivocal answer: Heck yes they’re keeping the Zin.
In implicit and explicit ways, Officer deserves much of the credit for this. His work with the Historic Vineyard Society has undoubtedly stirred a renewed interest in California’s heritage vineyards. In the cases of some Piner-Olivet properties — Papera, Saitone — Officer directly connected the right kinds of buyers with the sellers. Before Seghesio bought Montafi, Officer had leased it “for an obscene amount of money,” he says, to prevent the previous owners from planting Pinot there.
When he bought his own Carlisle Vineyard, in 1998, Officer beat out developers with much deeper pockets because he was able to convince then-owner Barbara Pelletti, whose father, Alcide, had planted the vineyard in 1927, that he would preserve her father’s vision.
He’s got nothing against Pinot Noir. It’s just that Officer sees in the old vineyards of Piner-Olivet an endangered species — a link to the past that will quickly collapse under economic pressures if its defenders don’t guard it carefully.
“Anytime an old-vine vineyard sells, I’m always concerned,” says Officer. “But I think producers, and now consumers, are starting to get a sense for what these vines really mean.”
What, exactly, do they mean? They’re just grapevines – and decrepit, straggly ones, at that.
“The reasons why traditions stay is because of success in the past,” says Jesse Katz, as of last November the owner of the Ponzo vineyard, planted in 1912. In other words, the longevity of these Zinfandel plantings testifies to their enduring appeal, impervious to any decade’s trends and fads.
(Ironically, Officer believes that the white Zinfandel craze in the ’80s and ’90s protected many of these plantings. Fruit from Montafi, Papera, Gambogi, Saitone, Barbieri and Carlisle all went into sweetish, blush-colored wines from wineries like DeLoach and Beringer. “If it weren’t for white Zin, these vineyards wouldn’t exist,” Officer says.)
Katz was perhaps an unlikely suitor for Ponzo. He doesn’t currently make Zinfandel; in fact, his Aperture and Devil Proof labels are tightly focused on Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec. But he was charmed by Ponzo’s old bones. It’s made a Zinfandel maker out of him.
Likewise, Max Reichwage was not making any Zinfandel when he purchased the Mancini Ranch, near the Carlisle Vineyard, in 2014. “We weren’t even looking for a vineyard,” Reichwage says. He has his work cut out for him in renovating the 19-acre site, where at least 30 percent of the vines have died, and fruit trees — apple, pear, plum – intrude haphazardly where vines should be.
The cost-efficient way to replant would be to install trellises, today’s standard method. But Reichwage has chosen to kick it old school: He’ll be replanting headtrained vines, spaced 8 feet by 8 feet, mimicking the method of the original 1922 planting.
“Trellises are like solar panels,” says Jeff Mangahas, winemaker at Williams Selyem. “Being vertical increases the efficiency of the fruit, from a sugar perspective. It leads to more sun, more evenness, more ripeness.” Head-trained Zin – bush vines, the Europeans would say – is floppy, its sun exposure scattered and irregular, far less systematic in producing sugary grapes.
Williams Selyem is among California’s most famous Pinot Noir producers; less well known is the winery’s longstanding interest in Russian River Zinfandel. They’ve long made a Zinfandel from Papera, and have recently begun working with Zin from the nearby Fanucchi Wood Road Vineyard. But Saitone, which the winery bought last summer, represents its first Zinfandel estate. Saitone retains some vines from its original 1895 planting.
Plantings of that era were never monovarietal — it wasn’t customary to plant vineyard blocks to a single grape variety until after Repeal. So interspersed among the Zinfandel in these old fields is a cornucopia of “mixed black” varieties: a Mourvedre vine here, a Tempranillo vine there. “Mixed black” includes white grapes, too. Piner-Olivet sites have lots of Palomino, the main grape used in Sherry.
The Carlisle Vineyard, for instance, is 88 percent Zinfandel; 39 other varieties comprise
the remainder. These include grapes — I’ll go out on a limb here — you have never heard of: Albillo Mayor, Bouteillan Noir, Grec Rouge, Criolla Mediana Dos, Blauer Portugieser.
Officer lights up with reverence when he talks about his vineyard. Like an archaeologist piecing together the lives of an extinct population through fragments of their pottery, he finds himself excavating the farming practices, and thought processes, of the San Pellegrinetto settlers through the roots they left behind.
“Was it random? Were the budders drunk? People did not keep good records,” says Mike Officer. “But I have a hard time believing it was all random.”
In the Carlisle Vineyard, teinturiers — grapes with red, rather than clear, juice, like Alicante Bouschet and Grand Noir — are planted in the lower-lying, waterlogged areas. This must have been intentional, Officer reasons. “I think Alcide Pelletti’s thinking was: ‘I have this swale, it’s not the best soil, so I’ll put teinturiers here since I’m only interested in them for their color contribution.’ ” At Saitone, too, Alicante is planted more where the soils are a heavier, water-holding clay.
The preponderance of Alicante here sets Piner-Olivet apart from other old-vine Zin regions of Northern California. It makes sense: This area is cooler, so its wines would have wanted the color concentration that Alicante could provide. Similarly, there’s a noticeable dearth of Carignan here, compared with other old-vine regions; Carignan is a high-acid grape, and acid is something the Piner-Olivet wines do not lack.
All over, the properties bear marks of the ties that bound the San Pellegrinetto immigrants. “Every ranch in this area has the same English walnut tree,” says Reichwage. “And they all have the same shaped house, probably built by the same Italian carpenter.”
That Reichwage will replant Mancini in the old, widespaced, head-trained way pleases Officer. He convinced Stuart Coulson to do the same when he renovated portions of Papera in 2009. Together, these are signs that Piner-Olivet can endure not only as a home for Zinfandel, but as a home for Zinfandel in the way that the Mancinis, Montafis, Paperas and Pellettis envisioned it.
Viewed this way, a heritage vineyard becomes so much more than a vineyard. “Part of what I’m doing here is trying to keep alive a way of farming that’s slowly dying off,” Officer says.
“We’re not just preserving vineyards — we’re trying to preserve that culture of farming.”