Blind Tasting - California Field Blends

First post - I’ve been enjoying reading this forum and I’m learning that I don’t know nearly as much about wine as I thought I did…

These are notes from a tasting I held a couple weeks ago. The theme was California field blends, including wines in the spirit of the field blend: single vineyard old vine zins, and field blend styled wines from multiple vineyards, in general old vine zin/pets/carignane/alicante bouchet/etc.

The setup was 4 couples, each brings 1-2 bottles totaling up to $60. Part of that idea was to compare wines of similar styles across different price points.

The wines were all decanted through an aeration device and tasted blind.

Wine #1 – Dark ruby, cherries, red fruits, strong peppery component… Nice acidity to balance the fruit. Long finish. 91 pts Revealed: 2005 Rosenblum Zinfandel Monte Rosso $41

My comments: Rosenblum? An old favorite of me and my wife, from maybe 15 years ago, but I have a distinct memory sometime in the past 5 years, tasting through a flight of Rosenblum Zins where the 3rd straight glass of cherry jolly rancher caused me to set my glass down and say, “I’ve had enough of these guys.” A friend and I had both tasted Ravenswood Old Hill earlier in the week and we were both dead sure this was the same wine. A change of style at Rosenblum, or does Monte Rosso trump the winemaker’s style?

Wine #2 – Light ruby, lighter at edges. More pepper, spices, red fruits, silky smooth texture. Short on the finish. 88 pts Revealed: 2004 Ledson RRV Old Vine Zin $NA

My comments: Most zin is consumed at our house in the first 5 years of life, but this was quite pleasant and drinking very well.

Wine #3 – Light purple, plum, cherries, leather. Apparent oak, then it just dies on the finish with tannin and some heat. 84 pts Revealed: 2007 Three Wine Company Old Vines (40% Zinfandel, 33% Carignane, 12% Mataro, 11% Petite Sirah, 2% Alicante Bouschet, and 2% Black Malvoisie) $18

My comment: Matt Cline’s project from the old Contra Costa vineyards, a little disappointing, not as approachable young as Cline. Maybe this shows better in a couple years?

Wine #4 – Dark ruby, plums, cedar, leather, very smooth, finishing with oak and cherries. 89 pts. Revealed: 2006 Bogle Phantom (49% Zinfandel, 49% Petite Sirah, 2% Mourvedre) $16

My comment: A surprise wine, very approachable and enjoyable, great QPR. I marked it down a little for the apparent oak, but the cheapest wine at the tasting and on the group’s average, the highest score of the night.

Wine #5 – Light ruby, earthy, mushroom scents on the nose, then cherries, tannin and alcoholic heat. 85 points Revealed: 2007 Ravenswood Old Hill (76% Zin 24% mixed blacks) $60

My comment: So this was the Ravenswood Old Hill. It seemed to show much better earlier in the week. Did it need more air to open up? Or did blind tasting remove the expectations? I’d like to think the former, but maybe a bit of both. If I had any more I’d lay them down for a few years, but I don’t and I’m not convinced of the $60 price point on this one.

Wine #6 – Dark purple. Intense purple berries, pepper, smoke, very smooth, long finish. 90 pts. Revealed: 2003 Ridge Independence School (88% Zin 9% Carignane 3% Petite Sirah) $25 ATP

My comment: Another older zin showing very nicely.

Wine #7 – Strong dark cocoa on the nose, with red berries. Chocolate covered cherries, leather, licorice… racy acidity carries into a long and evolving finish. 92 pts Revealed: 2008 Bedrock Heirloom (40% Zinfandel, 30% Carignane, 40% mixed blacks) $35

My comment: My WOTN but also the most controversial wine for the group. People had this either at the top or bottom of their lists. Also the youngest in the group. I had a talk with Morgan Twain-Peterson about this tasting and he told me since doesn’t rack until bottling his wines are even more primary when young, and he expects the drinking window on this wine to fall in the 5-7 years range.

A couple surprises - the Bogle Phantom was a crowd pleaser and the least expensive in the tasting. Zins in the 5-7 year range all showed pretty well, and the 2-3 year range either didn’t show well, or were controversial, which flies in the face of our typical wisdom when it comes to zin.

Kudos for the excellent notes of a well-designed tasting.

Bogle Zin has long been a good QPR, often the best wine available to me at non-wine oriented parties.

Were any of the “field-blend style” wines actually picked and fermented together? What are the trade-offs of a true field blend?

bogle phantom is always a great BBQ wine when they make it. seems they only do it in good years.

Larry - welcome to the board. I was not aware that Ravenswood was still pulling from Old Hill… These wines need 10+ years from vintage date IMO. We did a tasting of the 1991, 1994 and 1997 a few weeks ago and the 94/97 were still remarkably fresh. See our notes here: World Cup wines, a Zin gathering. - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

You’ve piqued my interest on these again - I was under the assumption that they stopped pulling from Old Hill when the take-over happened.

Mike, thanks for the welcome. I believe you’re right about the drinking window on the Old Hill. It did show well in the tasting room however, which means yes it probably could have shown better, maybe if opened this the night before. The Ravenswood SVD are all really built more like cabs and show age really well, maybe to their detriment with the current fashion in zin, but I still really enjoy these wines.

I believe it was Gallo locked Ravenswood/Constellation out of the Monte Rosso. They still get Old Hill.

I’m glad I got your interest. I always thought of these wines as the distinctly Californian version of a CdP. It was interesting to taste these across a range of ages. There was definitely a core style apparent across all these wines.

Thanks!

Indeed and also a reliable call at restaurants with overpriced wine lists. The Bogle Petite Sirah was an old standby of me and my (now) wife when we were on college budgets.

That’s a great question. I did some research leading into this tasting and learned that historically (pre-prohibition) the blend was determined by how the field was planted, and everything was picked together and co-fermented. This was probably for economy, because the farmers probably only had one large vat. The downside is clearly, the grape varieties won’t all ripen at the same time. Proponents say co-fermentation leads to better texture, depth, and integration of flavors.

I’ve talked to winemakers whose reaction to picking a mixed field all at once bordered on disbelief. They can’t imagine picking unripe/overripe fruit and losing control over blending trials.

Terra d’Oro planted a field blend of zin, petite sirah, and barbera and they specifically pick the whole thing when the zin is ripe, which leaves the pets overripe, and the barbera underripe. They believe this in the end balances the wine. Clearly they have a lot of enthusiasm for this concept and they go into great details here:
http://terradorowinery.com/shr-zinfandel.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

My wife and I visited them and considered this wine for the tasting, but I hate to say it, we weren’t all that impressed with the wine. Maybe part of its weakness here in comparison is that it’s a pretty young vineyard. It is an interesting experiment to actually plant a modern vineyard to this historical concept.

So, I don’t actually know how many of these wines were really co-fermented. The Bedrock page says the wine is “field blended” but then implies the zin is fermented separately. I found an article here that claims Ravenswood, Ridge, Bucklin, and Carlisle all co-ferment:
Field of blends / Interplanted vineyards produce some of California's most captivating wines" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That looks like it was a great tasting. I’ll keep an eye out for next time you’re getting together.

Thanks for posting the notes. A little clarification on the co-fermentation stuff.

I make a few Heirloom Wines, all of which feature some elements of cofermentation.

For the Bedrock Heirloom Wine, which comes from vines planted in 1888 at my own vineyard, I pick the Zinfandel along with all the mixed-blacks in a given block and ferment them together (this is what I referred to on the website as the Zin. I have two blocks each of Mourvedre (with some Carignane interplanted), and Carignane (with some Mourvedre, Zinfandel, Tempranillo, and other goodies), which were also planted in 1888. I pick the fruit from the Carignane block (along with the whatever else is in there) separately as it ripens a bit later than the Zinfandel. The finished wine in 2007 was a mixture of the two. In 2008 and 2009 I also picked out just the mixed-blacks (about 19 different varieties or so) and came up with a third lot. These MB’s came from blocks going to other wineries. Thus, there is cofermentation in all the elements, but it is not one massive blend.

For the Lorenzo’s Heirloom, from a 100 year old vineyard on the Dry Creek Bench, I pick Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, Carignane, Alicante Bouschet, and a few other things-- some from different blocks, some interplanted, and coferment them. This has the benefit of making for an easy fermentation (the Zinfandel might be 25-26 brix, but the Carignane and Pets are always lower so I do not need to worry about doing water-backs and all that stuff one needs to do sometimes when working exclusively with Zinfandel).

The Dolinsek Heirloom Wine, from the old Frati Ranch in RRV, is a straight cofermentation of everything is the field-- Zinfandel, Pets, AB, Golden Chasselas, Teredelgo, etc.

Similarly, this year I am working with a mixed block at Papera Ranch which is about 47% Carignane, 48% Zinfandel, and then 16 or so other varieties. This will hopefully all get picked and vinified together.

I am a firm believer in co-fermentation-- and I would venture a guess that most winemakers afraid of the variation in ripeness are also freaked out by making Zinfandel generally. The ripening pattern on the clusters of Zinfandel mean that you are always looking at raisins, green-berries, and perfectly ripe fruit, on the same cluster. This makes picking decisions really difficult, and the phobia regarding under-ripe fruit in CA has led to a lot of Zin’s that give the variety a bad name (over-ripe, sweet (stuck fermentation?), VA, etc.). In my opinion the other varieties add things like color, tannin, acid, complexity, which is often needed in Zinfandel.

I would also point out that this is a technique not exclusively used in California. CDP has for eons been a cofermentation of up to 14 varieties including several white cultivars. So too, has Chianti Classico, though it is fading there. Marcel Deiss in Alsace field-blends up to 14 different varieties for his top white wines from Altenbourg, Shonenbourg, Burg, Beblenhein, Engelgarten, etc… Even within the city of Vienna there are delicious whites made from upwards of 20 varieties sometimes.

Hi Morgan,

Thanks a lot for chiming in here and for all the detailed information on your blends and on co-fermentation in general.

That Papera Ranch sounds really interesting and something to look forward to for sure. I’m already trying to fortify my bank account against some of the SVD Syrahs you’ll be introducing for '09.

Cheers,
Larry

Larry - please come next time we do a Zin tasting. Perhaps it is time to get one set-up single-blind Mike and really dissect these wines?

Glen - absolutely, I’m game.