Prima Materia goes back and forth between making Zinfandel and Primitivo since we have both planted in our vineyard. Primitivo is more earthy and brambly, while with the Zin we go for more red fruit. But, a friend of a friend somehow purchased a small piece of property just north of Healdsburg in the heart of Dry Creek Valley. On the property were Zinfandel vines planted in 1965 (plus some younger ones and a little Cabernet Sauvignon) and they asked if I could manage the vines and make wine from them while they decided what they wanted to do with the property. The answer was an easy yes.
I love getting dirty in a new vineyard, and this was my first time working with 50-year-old vines and grown without any irrigation at that. Even though many of our vines are hitting 20 years of age, these old vines act very differently, so there was a bit of a learning curve. They produced much less fruit as expected, but they stubbornly held onto surprisingly high acidity as well. There is also a general dictum when thinking about picking the fruit from dry-farmed vines when a heat wave comes: if you think it is almost time to pick and 100-degree heat is coming, you are already two days too late. Though old vines are true champions, they have a much narrower window of ripeness, going from almost ripe to collapsing in just a couple days without irrigation to soften the circumstances. We picked these and loaded them on our flatbed just in the nick of time.
For me this has classic Dry Creek Zin characteristics on a medium-weight chassis. Barely touching 13.6% alcohol, and with just a tiny bit of oak, this is far from jammy. I get bright and dusty raspberry along with lots of blue-fruit huckleberry, bright acidity and a nice bit of tannin as well from a 15-day fermentation, making it pleasingly medium weight with an almost Italian-style finish, but with the big fruit lift that we get in California. The 2022 vintage was bizarre in being quite cool (acidity, lower alcohol, brambly fruit) then record hot touching 115F at this vineyard. I believe it as already over 100 degrees when we finished picking, and old-vine Zin really shows vintage!
A bit of Zin trivia: Tribidrag, Crljenak Kaštelanski, Primitivo, then Zinfandel. The lineage of what was once called “California’s grape” became a little more complicated with DNA fingerprinting. Zinfandel first arrived in the New World in 1829 through Hungary, which at the time included the grape’s homeland of Croatia, while twin brother Primitivo had a slight head start in becoming Puglia’s grape by 1799. Though both grapes are considered genetically identical, Zinfandel shows a whole world of clonal variation with over 100 biotypes of all sorts just in Lodi. The diversity is quite astounding, and surprisingly clear to see.
Label Image: Contemporary artist Bill Gian (who passed recently from pancreatic cancer unfortunately) has been a friend of Prima Materia’s for some time, and we were excited when he offered his “Black Poppy” painting to use. Much of Gian’s art explores his Greek-American heritage, and it felt like a worthy match to Crljenak Kastelanki’s own cultural identity conundrum, both past and present.
4 barrels made, 92 cases produced