Robert Sinskey Vineyards

Once in a Blue Moon – The Saga of Zinskey Late…

It just won’t happen every year. Sometimes it’s going to be sweet, and sometimes it’s not. It all depends on the weather… and on a willingness to roll the dice with nature.

RSV’s half acre of Zinfandel vines crest the top of the Vandal Vineyard in the cool Carneros region. Conventional wisdom preaches that the area is too cool to ripen Zin. Yes, it may be problematic some years, but other years, well, perhaps a different “wisdom” is at work. Each harvest, long after RSV’s other grapes have been put to bed, the Zin ripens. The resulting berries are evenly ripe, rich with black fruit flavor and zingy with mouth watering acidity. The resulting dry wine is more of a claret-style Zin than an over the top, potent, new California-style of rocket fuel, er, um… wine.

Once in a blue moon, these already late ripening grapes hit peak maturity in the midst of a late fall Indian summer. This is the season of the gambler. If it rains, the fruit is lost. However, if nature keeps her end of the bargain, holding winter at bay for several more short, warm days, then RSV can employ an ancient method of intensification (see winegrowing notes) that magically transports the grapes to where elegance meets hedonism.

This is only the third bottling of the Zinskey Late in the history of the Vandal Vineyard, and with just four barrels produced, there are precious few bottles to go around. Don’t forget, the joy of a rare wine is popping the cork in the company of those you cherish most… just make sure it’s a cherished few as the Zinskey Late only comes in a half bottle!

Old School – Sometimes it’s best to abandon modern technology in favor of the wisdom of the ancients. In crafting the Zinskey Late, winemaker Jeff Virnig employs a winemaking technique the Greeks picked up on a visit to Crete some 2,500 years ago. They watched the Cretans twist the stems of their grape bunches, cutting them off from sap, but leaving them to hang on the vine for several more days. This dried the grapes a bit, concentrating sugar and flavor, while other more subtle changes occurred within the grapes to create exotic and complex tastes like those you find in the Zinskey Late.

Most of the celebrated wines of antiquity were made in this manner and the method still persists all over Europe. Vin Santo, Amarone, Vin de Paille and even Tokaji are just a few of the famous wines made with dehydrated grapes. For the ancients, the drying process was an early method of concentration that ensured ripe fruit every vintage, even difficult ones, but it proved popular for another reason, too. These wines, naturally high in alcohol and sugar, were robust and sturdy. In other words, they were indestructible. Given the relatively primitive winemaking, storage and transportation practices of the day, they were the only wines the ancients had that would successfully age.

Some vintages, when Indian summer pushes the rains back another week or two, RSV does it Cretan-style. The vineyard crew gives each cluster of Zinfandel grapes a half twist, leaving them to dry on the vine for several days. In 2004, sugars climbed to around 32 degrees brix at harvest. The wine slowly fermented for two weeks in small, open-top, square bins to about 9 degrees brix. After pressing, fermentation continued until the yeast went under the table at 16.4% alcohol, leaving a pleasurably sweet 4.3 degrees brix. Four French oak barrels of Zinskey Late aged for eighteen months in the RSV caves.

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