This issue follows Zinfandel back to where it started, a tangled vineyard on the Croatian coast, and then home again to a hillside in the Sierra Foothills that has been growing it since the 1860s. For the table, a slow Dalmatian braise from the same stretch of coast as the grape.

Wine

Old-vine Zinfandel at Vineyard 1869 in Amador County, a cousin of the vines in Kaštela. Photo courtesy of Jana Harvey, Scott Harvey Wines.

Red From Kaštela

Kaštela, on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia

Mike Grgich got to the Napa Valley in 1958, a Croatian who had grown up making wine with his family in a small village on the Dalmatian coast and had left Yugoslavia a few years earlier with very little. Decades later, asked about those first weeks, he told a magazine writer, “first day I saw zinfandel,” and he meant that he recognized it.

The grape looked like something from home. He was sure it was kin to Plavac Mali, the dark, thick-skinned red his part of Croatia had grown for generations, and for the next forty years he said so to anyone in California who would listen.

What the words "old vine" should mean on a bottle of Zinfandel is a story of its own, in Old Vine Zinfandel and the Words on the Label.

Travel  ·  The region

Where it is

Kaštela is a string of seven small towns along the bay between Split and Trogir, on Croatia's Dalmatian coast.

Coastline from GSHHG shorelines, terrain shading added with AI. Tap the map to see it full size.

If you go

Start in Kaštel Novi, the town where the grape was found, at Kaštel Sikuli, which pours Crljenak Kaštelanski in its tastings. Then head a few minutes east to Bedalov, a family winery with a tasting room on the water in Kaštel Kambelovac. Both are small, so get in touch before going.

Split and Trogir each sit about twenty minutes away by car, with plenty of places to stay in both. For a bed in Kaštela itself, Hotel Štacija pours Crljenak too.

Travel

Vineyard 1869 in winter. Photo courtesy of Jana Harvey, Scott Harvey Wines.

Ten Acres on Steiner Road

Vineyard 1869, Shenandoah Valley, Amador County

The gate on Steiner Road opens one morning a year, in January, for a couple of hours. Behind it, about five miles northeast of Plymouth and tucked behind the buildings of the Renwood winery, ten acres of Zinfandel climb a slope that faces north, which is the direction a red grape is not supposed to face anywhere in California.

The vines sit on land recorded in an 1869 deed, the oldest documented Zinfandel vineyard in America still producing. When the vineyard was walked in the spring of 2015, just over eighty percent of the vines were still the originals, and the next year the California State Fair named it Vineyard of the Year.

Wine  ·  This issue's bottle

Scott Harvey Vineyard 1869 Old Vine Zinfandel 2023

Zinfandel, Amador County, Sierra Foothills

Before the first sip, the smell gets there first. It’s blackberry jam on my grandmother’s kitchen table in West Gardiner, with black cherry mixed in, and under the fruit is the dirt road out front of the farm right after a summer rain. That earthy smell is what pulled me back to Maine before I ever tasted it.

In the glass come her spice cabinet at Christmas, with black pepper, clove, cinnamon, and a little cocoa, plus a broken-in leather ball glove and the coffee pot that sat on the stove all day. It’s plush going down, but there’s enough grip and freshness to keep it from turning into syrup. The finish hangs around a long time, warm and peppery, and by the second glass I’m reminded this is not a small wine.

The fruit comes from the ten acres on Steiner Road, the vineyard in the story above.

Flavor profile The tags are smells and flavors people often find in this wine. Nothing is added; they come from the grapes and the winemaking. One bar is the least, five the most. Sweetness Dry, though the ripe fruit can read as sweet Body Full, with weight on the tongue Acidity Enough tang to keep it lively Oak Some toast and spice from the barrel Alcohol 14.5%, a noticeable warmth Serve at 60 to 65°F. Of all things, this wine took me back to my dorm room at UMaine in the ’80s, drinking white Zinfandel out of whatever glass was clean. It was pink and sweet, and I thought I was doing something sophisticated. I’ve had plenty of great Zinfandels since then, but the 1869 is the one that put me back in that room. Its vines were already in the ground by 1869, the year the transcontinental railroad was finished, and they were more than a hundred years old while I was up in Orono pouring the pink stuff. I wish I had known better back then.

It’s sold on the Scott Harvey Wines website and at the winery’s tasting room in Plymouth.

Food  ·  At the table

Illustration generated with AI.

Pašticada and Old-Vine Zinfandel

A Sunday braise from the coast where the grape started

Pašticada is the dish Dalmatian families make for weddings, holidays and big Sunday dinners, beef stuffed with garlic and bacon, marinated overnight in vinegar and wine, and braised for hours with prunes until the sauce turns dark and a little sweet and sour. The oldest known recipe for it was written down in Dubrovnik in the fifteenth century, the same century Tribidrag turns up in the Dalmatian records, and Croatian cooks still pass around versions made the Kaštela way.

The prunes and the slow sauce meet old-vine Zinfandel's dark fruit, and the wine's acidity keeps all that richness from sitting too heavy. In Dalmatia it comes to the table over gnocchi. It takes two days, most of it waiting, and it is better on the second.

Wine school

Wine Quiz

🛢️  Making wine

1. In 1975 a batch of pink Zinfandel stopped fermenting before all its sugar was gone, and the sweet result became White Zinfandel. Which winery made it?

A. Ridge Vineyards
B. Sutter Home
C. Ravenswood

🍇  Grapes and places

2. In Puglia, the heel of Italy's boot, Zinfandel goes by another name. What is it?

A. Negroamaro
B. Primitivo
C. Aglianico

🍷  In the glass

3. True or false: Zinfandel ripens so unevenly that a single bunch can hold shriveled raisins and hard green berries at the same time.

🍽️  At the table

4. True or false: a fiery-hot dish makes a big, high-alcohol Zinfandel taste even hotter.

🎩  Wine people

5. For more than a century, which California wine pioneer got the credit, probably wrongly, for bringing Zinfandel to the state?

A. Agoston Haraszthy
B. Charles Krug
C. Robert Mondavi

Answers at the bottom.

Meet the Winemakers

Forty-one harvests in a notebook Since 1986, Ivo Jeramaz has written a line or two a day about every vintage at Grgich Hills Estate in a handwritten notebook. Ask him about a lot from 1993 and he can find its pH in a few seconds, while the colleague who keeps it all on the computer needs about two hours. His twenty answers also cover the day a pallet of his uncle Mike Grgich's favorite Zinfandel hit the floor. Read the interview

Wine school  ·  Answers

1. B, Sutter Home. The stuck batch was meant to be a dry pink wine. Sold sweet instead, it became one of the best-selling wines in America.

2. B, Primitivo. DNA tests showed Primitivo and Zinfandel are the same grape, and both trace back to Croatia.

3. True. Growers often wait for the green berries to catch up, and by then some have shriveled, which is part of why Zinfandel can run high in alcohol.

4. True. Chili heat and alcohol amplify each other, so a spicy dish does better with a lighter, fruitier Zinfandel than a 15 percent one.

5. A, Agoston Haraszthy. The Hungarian count founded Buena Vista in Sonoma and brought in thousands of European vines, so the story stuck to him. Records show Zinfandel was already growing in California before his shipments arrived.

Have a question about a bottle on your table? Hit reply and ask. I read every one.

See you in two weeks.

Patrick R. Dunn

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