Wine & Spirits - June 2020 - 24

Marcassin and Peter Michael.
A few years ago, Tegan Passalacqua drove me several hours
into the mountains to visit
Bohan. Passalacqua is winemaker
and vineyard manager for Turley.
George Bohan, Mick's son, who
now farms the site, laughed about
his dad defying all expert advice as
we stood in the vines beside the
old dirt road.
Driving into the site felt like
traveling back into old California.
The ranch was not only remote by
distance but also in style. Newer
plantings of pinot noir and chardonnay could be seen in the distance but Bohans' zinfandel vineyard felt more rustic. Near the
old sheep shed, the head-trained,
own-rooted vines looked a bit
scraggly.
More recently, during my California covid-19 mandatory shelter-in-place, I opened a bottle of
Turley 2017 Bohan Ranch Zinfandel. It was the last vintage of
Bohan for Turley, as well as the
first (and only) time they bottled
it as a vineyard designate. After the 2017 harvest, George
Bohan pulled the zinfandel in favor of pinot noir. The vines
had started to decline.
The wine struck me. It was high toned and full of wild
aromatics, somehow pinot noir-like (though more structured), with layers of earth and forest rather than the
upfront fruit more common to zinfandel. I called Passalacqua to ask why 2017 was the only year they bottled it as
a vineyard designate.
Out of the 15 years Turley had worked with the fruit, he
believes they could have bottled it on its own in four vintages. "The 2017 was the most complete wine we ever made
from the site," Passalacqua tells me. In other vintages, the
Bohan fruit became a blending component to bring aromatics and brightened acidity to the Turley Old Vine blend.
The issue was not only waiting for ripeness, according to
Passalacqua; it was also uneven ripening. "Uneven clusters
are zinfandel's calling card," he says. "Even so, the Bohan
site had its own crop balance. For some reason, it weathered storms. And the temperatures were more even there,"
which helped to reduce vine stress and to preserve fresh,
high-toned aromatics.
"To me it also comes down to hydration," Passalacqua
says. "In the coastal mountains it can still get hot but you
have fog coming in to rehydrate the vines. The wines are
more dew-kissed than sun-kissed, like you get from inland
sites. That dew-kissed sense gives a little wilder aromatic."
But that additional humidity has its downside. "There
is more risk for botrytis," Passalacqua admits. "It demands
more sorting in the cellar, but that is true of coastal pinot
noir, too."
Though Bohan's zinfandel is now gone, it inspired at
least one other zinfandel vineyard in the region.

F ar Co a st
Z in
A fresh side of California's
signature variety
by ELAINE CHUKAN BROWN

here were no vines deep in the mountains along the Sonoma Coast. It
was the early 1970s and viticultural
experts considered the region too
cold: Wine grapes would never ripen.
Mick Bohan planted them anyway. A
sheep rancher, he got zinfandel cuttings from a friend and put them in
along the road at 1,500 feet in elevation, on a ridge less
than two miles from the ocean.
Bohan's gamble instigated a march to the coast, as others followed suit. But it was pinot noir, not zinfandel, that
brought in now famed producers such as Hirsch, Flowers,
24

WINE & SPIRITS

JUNE 2020

PHOTO (TOP) BY LEIGH-ANN BEVERLEY, (RIGHT) BY SEAN DESMOND

ERIC SUSSMAN AT
RADIO-COTEAU'S
ESTATE VINEYARD
IN OCCIDENTAL

Wine & Spirits - June 2020

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