Found Teldeschi

What a nice surprise! Lori and Marc found a bottle of 1993 Teldeschi zinfandel on the menu at the Blue Room in Cambridge last week. Considering that it is 14 years old, it was a pretty sturdy zinfandel that went well with the mushroom pasta and shrimp and chorizo we ate. Having lost the fruit it presumably had early on, the wine has matured to a nice mellow spot, earthy and rich. We'd be pretty pleased if our zin tasted like this after 14 years (2021!). For an interesting overview of the Teldeschi vineyards, check out its history here. Although a bit unclear, it seems Teldeschi itself is no longer bottling under its own name, but Ravenswood continues to make a single-vineyard Teldeschi zin. Keep an eye out for older Teldeschi or newer Ravenswood Teldeschi vineyard wines in restaurants or wine stores and let us know how they are holding up.

Got Grapes?

• Our burgeoning wine project owes a debt of gratitude to Marc and his love for podcasts. In his quest for the best wine-related podcast, he happened to come across the Cellar Rat, produced by Alan Baker, a self-professed wine geek based in San Francisco. One of the Cellar Rat's most interesting podcasts focused on his personal wine-making venture, courtesy of a custom-crush facility catering to such small-time winemaker wannabes.

How fortuitous for the four of us, as we all fit that description. And so our association with Crushpad began during a somewhat inebriated discussion about this podcast on the Goldstein porch in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November 2006 following Ryan's Florida IronMan. Though we admit none of us has met a wine we don't like, that evening Ryan and Marc narrowed the varietal down to zinfandel for this first project (while Lori and Katie made their way through a bottle of port in the living room, after which they contributed their two cents that we should investigate making a few bottles of zinfandel port out of some of the barrel).

Research into Crushpad and the types of zinfandel grapes offered began. Available zinfandel vineyards for 2007 harvest are:

• Beatty Ranch Vineyard, Napa Valley (Howell Mountain): This dry-farmed, old vine zinfandel is located at 1800 feet elevation in Howell Mountain. It's a trek to get to them, but since they've been there since before World War I, it's worth the trip. The vines are head-trained and are spaced approximately 2m x 2m. They enjoy long days of warm sunshine thanks to the high elevation that puts them above the Napa fog, but still enjoy cool nights which work to ensure a good level of acidity even at higher levels of ripeness. Wines made from this vineyard have telltale signs of pomegranate and juniper berry and muscular tannins found throughout the Howell Mountain AVA.
  


• Grist Vineyard, Dry Creek Valley: Located at 1,000 feet above the Dry Creek valley floor, this certified organic vineyard adds a bit of mountain structure and spice to traditional Dry Creek brambly, red fruits. The vines are head pruned and sit in iron-rich red volcanic soils that stress the vines into low yields and concentrated wines. Needless to say, this vineyard has an incredible track record and we're very excited to be working with it for the first time in 2007.
  


• Teldeschi Vineyard, Dry Creek Valley (Sonoma): This vineyard produces Zinfandel, Syrah and Petite Sirah from vines that are up to 115 years old. Like most great zinfandel, the zin vines are head pruned, yields are low and the grapes are packed with flavors of cherry, blackberry and boysenberry. If you're a zin fan, you've undoubtedly had some of this stuff (perhaps from a winery that starts with an R). The cool kids these days are blending a small amount of petite sirah with zin for structure – so Crushpad is supporting zinmakers with some additional petite for blending purposes. If you like your wines big, this is the vineyard for you.

The next step was to scour the Internet for wines made from these vineyards for a tasting at the Davenport South compound in Westerly, Rhode Island. This was no easy feat since, as far as we could tell, only one or two (in the case of Beatty Ranch) wineries make single-vineyard zins from these grapes. Luckily, and with much Internet sleuthing, on short notice we were able to locate a wine from each of the vineyards for the tasting. We had the best success with Wades Wines, a wine store in California that was able to deliver quickly, and, when a NJ store failed us, Lori located a Providence wine store near Brown (and on the way to Westerly) that carried the Teldeschi. The bottles were:

• 2001 Highlands Zinfandel Beatty Ranch



• 2003 Turley Zinfandel Grist Vineyards



• 2004 Ravenswood Zinfandel Teldeschi

While admittedly highly unscientific, with wines from different years, winemakers, and vineyards, we were able to settle with reasonable comfort on the Teldeschi grapes for the project. The Beatty Ranch was extremely light in color and flavors, and we felt we wanted a stronger, more extracted zinfandel. The Turley was, well, a Turley, and we wouldn't flatter ourselves to think that we could produce a Turley the first time out. Plus it was a departure from the traditional fruity and spicy zinfandel as it was more earthy and mineral tasting. The Ravenswood was in the tried and true style of Ravenswood single-vineyard wines before it sold out to Constellation. And that seemed to be what we were looking to make: strong, bold, spicy. In short, a zin.



Some interesting notes on timing from the back of the Ravenswood bottle. Those grapes were picked on September 24, 2004, which is some indication of when we might need to plan to be out in the wine country if we want to participate in harvest. We can do some checking on what kind of weather there was in Sonoma in 2004 so we can try to draw some comparison to weather as it occurs this year. Also, this vintage was bottled April 18, 2006, a year and a half after harvest. If we were on that schedule, we wouldn't see our wine until Spring, 2009! We'll have to investigate whether that is a typical time for zin to sit in barrels.


Next up: picking a name. Get your thinking caps on.