“Just When I Think I’m Out … “

Dey pull me back in!” Man, do I know how Michael Corleone feels.

As noted last week, Kath and I got a couple of cool leads about Oakley vineyards from the sales don at Turley Wine Cellars, a high-end label specializing in Zinfandel.

Larry Turley and his team source premium fruit from all over California, and two of his vineyard designate Zins hail from spots in our ‘hood: Duarte and Salvador, two vineyards we’d never heard of, and which we have never seen on any other labels sourcing fruit from CoCo County.

See, this is the problem that Kathy and I keep running up against: Everywhere we go in Oakley and environs is another well-tended, ancient vineyard — dozens and dozens of ‘em. No signage, no clue who uses the fruit. But the crazy-making thing is that when we do talk to someone who knows where a particular vineyard is located, the directions are considerably shy of a real address. Jon Grant at Turley could tell us that the Salvador Vineyard was on Oakley Road, “across from the new housing development.” Unfortunately, the city of Oakley is almost nothing BUT new housing developments, and so, despite his best efforts, Jon wasn’t able to translate his intuitive mapping into specific cross streets for us. Kathy’s photo above is our best guess as to the location of Salvador.

And it certainly did not help that once we arrived at what we thought was Salvador Vineyard, the next few hundred feet of road revealed another half-dozen plots of old-vine acreage, across the municipal border into Antioch, that we’d never seen before.

We’re still searching for that vineyard Sherpa who can tell us where all the bodies are buried. And who owns the friggin’ shovels.

Hoping to celebrate our semi-quasi-sorta-kinda detective work, we just pulled the cork on Turley’s 2007 Salvador Vineyard Zinfandel. We tasted Turley’s Duarte last time, and the Salvador is distinctively different. It seems more typically Zin in character, with a color that Kathy described as that of cherry juice, and a nose of Santa Rosa plum and a touch of Bing cherry. I got some clove and pumpkin spice; Kath detected notes of pencil shaving and cedar. The acidity seemed a bit more pronounced than that of the Duarte, but a long finish provided for a wine just as satisfying.