Lodi Zinfandel: The Oldest Vines in California

Some of the Zinfandel vines in the Lodi wine region were planted in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties. The claim that these are among the oldest continuously producing wine grape vines in California is widely repeated in the wine press, and the scholarship on California agricultural history supports the general dating, though the Lodi Winegrape Commission's own vineyard documentation and University of California viticulture records would be the appropriate source for anyone who wants a precise vine-by-vine count. This production cannot certify individual vine ages, only the well-established historical pattern.

The pattern is this: Zinfandel was planted across the Central Valley floor in the decades after the Gold Rush, and the Lodi-area plantings survived Prohibition, which ran from nineteen twenty to nineteen thirty-three, because the fruit could be sold legally as table grapes during the dry years. Wineries closed. Vineyards that had planted varieties suited to wine but not to the table market pulled their vines. The Zinfandel growers in Lodi had something the market still wanted.

Old-vine Zinfandel produces less fruit per plant than younger vines, but the fruit is more concentrated. The root systems of plants that have been alive for a century or more reach deep enough to access water and nutrients that younger vines cannot, and the resulting wine has a texture and intensity that cannot be replicated by planting the same variety yesterday. For most of the twentieth century, the wine world did not care. Napa and the Central Coast commanded critical attention. Lodi was bulk country.

The rediscovery of old-vine Zinfandel as a serious category happened gradually, beginning in the nineteen eighties and accelerating in the nineteen nineties. The vines that survived because table grape buyers wanted them for two decades became the reason Lodi is now taken seriously. The market that saved them had no idea it was doing so.