If You Love BBQ, Get to Know this Grape, and this Wine

Today’s online edition of Decanter reported that veraison (that celebrated harbinger of harvest when wine grapes begin to blush and change color) has begun in the vineyards of northern California. They talked with winemakers from Napa, from Sonoma – all the usual suspects.  But like many others, did not speak to one of the oldest wine growing areas in California: Contra Costa County.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing where Contra Costa is. It is an AVA directly east of San Francisco Bay.  Once a prolific wine-growing region, the county is home to some century-old plantings of Zinfandel, Mourvèdre and Carignan that produce rustic, earthy and leathery styles of red wine. This particular wine checks all three of those boxes.

The county sits on the edge of the San Francisco and Suisun bays and the city of San Francisco across the bay gives the county its name – “contra costa” meaning “opposite shore” in Spanish.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, Contra Costa County had a significant portion of land under vine. However, during Prohibition, growers could not earn enough from their grapes to justify using such high-quality sites and other fruit crops such as cherries and pears were planted instead. Most grape growers moved further north and away from San Francisco into Napa and Sonoma counties, but a few hardy souls remained.

One of the area’s treasures is its old Zinfandel vines, which yield excellent deep, bold reds that rest on a strong tannic backbone and wild acidity. The quality soils of Contra Costa County are the defining feature of its terroir. Vines that were planted 100 years ago on deep, sandy soils are today aged thick knarled stock that have relatively low yields, particularly as the vines have aged.  Deep and free-draining, the sand offers little resistance to wandering root systems, and the lack of water in the ground means that the vines produce small, concentrated berries with thick skins. This is a good thing which leads to concentrated wines with firm tannins and excellent structure. We should all thank the Wine Gods that these growers have not torn these iconic vineyards out due to low productivity and the fact that Zinfandel is not exactly the most commercially viable wine grapes these days.  You can thank Sutter Home and the once ubiquitous White Zinfandel for that – at least in part.