This is an example of a younger-vine vineyard that—through selection of the vineyard site, pruning for low yields, climate, and soil type—produces fruit that tastes more like old-vine plantings. It’s an extremely rocky vineyard in the north of the Dry Creek Valley, and it increasingly is becoming one of our very favorite Dry Creek Valley vineyards for the intensity and complexity of the wines produced.

The vineyard—owned by Jack Florence of Rockpile Ranch fame—was planted from cuttings of the St. Peters Church clone, taken from the original Rockpile Ranch vines.  This clone of zinfandel has very tiny, intensely flavored berries, and the large proportion of skins to juice from these tiny berries make for an exceptionally rich, complex wine.

Dashe Cellars Zinfandel Florence Vineyard 2009 is made from 100% Zinfandel from the Florence Ranch

Black raspberry, cherry, earthy, mineral, chocolate, clove spice, long persistent finish of black raspberry fruit. Great velvety texture to the midpalate.

We used our special custom-made gridded tanks to ferment the wines. These tanks, outfitted with stainless-steel grids that can be raised or lowered on top of the crushed grapes, allow us to submerge the cap of grape skins beneath the surface of the fermenting wine. We extract color, body, and complexity from the grapes without extracting too much of the drying tannins found in the seeds. The result are intense and complex wines that feel velvety and round on the tongue rather than harsh or tannic.

We conducted the primary and secondary fermentation using only the natural populations of yeast and bacterias on the grapes, as always, to enhance the vineyard-specific flavors we get from these grapes. At dryness, the wine was gently pressed in a membrane press and pumped to older 60-gallon French oak barrels.

The wine was aged for 12 months, and was racked about every three months up to tank and then back down to barrel to clarify the wine and aid in its development.  In our blending trials, we decided the wine was superb on its own, and did not blend anything else to interfere with the intense, lovely fruit.