Wine & Spirits - June 2021 - 31

Kent Rosenblum's tireless search for zinfandel
sources led him here; he ended up contracting many new acres with many new varieties;
most of the region's modern plantings were
done at his request. As for Fred and Matt Cline,
their mother's relatives, the Jacuzzis (yes, the
whirlpool Jacuzzis) had roots in the Delta, and
between them they still manage and purchase
the lion's share of fruit in the area. Both brands
tended toward the high-octane style of the
overwrought aughts-ripe, full-bodied, highalcohol-a style for which the region became
known, but one that never really played to its
strengths, and may even have obscured them.
Turley Cellars was another early advocate. Its
winemaker, Ehren Jordan, had previously made
Contra Costa wines while working at Neyers
Vineyards, and when Tegan Passalacqua came
on to manage Turley's grape growing in 2003
(and later succeeded Jordan as winemaker), he
became fascinated with the region-not just
for its old vineyards, but because its soils were
a repository of windborne and alluvial activity.
Passalacqua is something of a connoisseur of
sand (his own brand, founded in 2009, is called
Sandlands), and he was impressed with the soil
depths the old vines' roots could reach-thirty
to forty feet in some cases.

He was intrigued by the morphology of the
granitic Delhi sand, and convinced Brenna
Quigley a freelance geologist working in viticulture, to walk the vines with him. She found
its texture to be unusually jagged and fragmented, an odd mixture of airborne and alluvial grains, high in feldspar and mica content
called " arkosic " sand. " It's not smooth, " she
says. " It looks like broken-down granite, shed
from the mountains, blown to the Delta by
wind or rapidly washed downstream. It's preserved the initial integrity of what it was. "
South and west of the Delta lies Mt. Diablo,
a 4,000-foot peak that rises from the coastal
plain " like a hat on a table, " as John McPhee
describes it in Assembling California. Its volcanic hillsides look extruded, writes McPhee,
" squeezed up through the valley sediments as
if through a pastry sleeve. " It serves as a backstop for sands carried from the Sierra, as well
as casting a rain shadow against coastal squalls
from the west.
Passalacqua eventually got to know old-timers like Joe Duarte, Rich Pato, Steve Gonsalves
and Frank Evangelho. " Part of my job was to
hang out with all the growers, " he says. " Oakley was always the first to bud and first to harvest, so it became an important part of the sea-

son. " Since Turley's harvest dates were typically
weeks earlier than any of the elders were used
to, he asked them to adjust their viticulture program to manage a different schedule-and to
upgrade their farming practices. " If they did, we
paid them accordingly, " he says.
Frank Evangelho needed no such incentive.
He had farmed the same 30 acres of vines for
most of his 73 years. As long ago as the late '70s,
Brother Timothy, the pioneering winemaker of
the Christian Brothers, had urged Evangelho
to pursue more rigorous agricultural practices:
make more passes through the vineyard, drop
fruit as needed, not let it get overripe.
Tending a vineyard that's now wedged
between an hourly-rate motel and a sandlot
overrun by dirt bikes, Evangelho became the
region's most vocal advocate for vineyard
preservation. Even as transmission towers
loom over the vines like robot sentinels, he
hoped they may ensure the vineyard's survival: PG&E owns about two-thirds of the
land occupied by vines.
In 2011, Evangelho reached out to Morgan
Twain-Peterson of the Bedrock Wine Company with an offer of fruit. Twain-Peterson,
son of Ravenswood's Joel Peterson, was just
beginning to establish himself as conserva-

THE VINES, A NEW SUBDIVISION IN OAKLEY, CA, WHERE SALVADOR VINEYARD ONCE STOOD

WINE & SPIRITS

JUNE 2021

Wine & Spirits - June 2021

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