OK, “Grease”-ey meets cheesy, but check out the photo above, with that ancient, wizened, gnarly limb intertwined with the sand.
Wait, that’s my arm. But the sand is the real deal. That’s what these 100-plus-year-old vines have been rooted in. As noted before, I can kill mint in a backyard garden. But these wine vines thrive for a century in this shi-ite?
We’ve written previously about the Larry Turley Zinfandels sourced from local plots (and we’re still trying to locate those local plots) in Oakley, and how the winds from the delta, formed by the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and the eastern winds from San Francisco Bay, conspired to form a whipped-up land that time forgot. A soil scientist at UC Davis opines that these sandy, wind-borne sediments were deposited from dry riverbeds at the end of the last Ice Age some 10,000 years ago, suggesting a drought during the Holoscene Epoch, the most recent period of the Cenozoic Era. Skool me, bruvah!
Grapes have been here for 150 years. Again, this type of “soil” means that the phylloxera vine louse can not burrow under dirt and kill the roots, as has happened so many times before elsewhere; sand falls in upon itself and leaves no traces. No pests, but no nutrients either?
Nature, I don’t know how you do it.
Kathy and I checked in with a Rosenblum 2007 “Heritage Clones” Petite Sirah from CoCo; not strictly Oakley, but grapes from a bit of east-neighboring Clarksburg town, too. Pretty murky-in-a-good-way look, with a nose of dried cranberry and blueberry. Big on the tongue, with nice acid and concentrated dried stone fruit, and a nicely furry tannic grip.
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