1976. Up in Dry Creek Valley, Zinfandel heartland of Sonoma County, Joel Peterson was picking for his first solo foray into crafting that stalwart Californian red. A lightning storm drenched the 29-year-old amateur winemaker as he hoisted 50lb tubs of grapes into his truck while two ravens harassed him from a nearby tree. And thereby hangs an epiphany. 

Let Zinfandel chronicler David Darlington take up the story in his Angels’ Visits (1991): “At the time Joel was reading Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermuir, a gothic novel whose hero, Lord Ravenswood, falls off a bridge and drowns in quicksand while coming to the rescue of his sweetheart.

“Under the circumstances it seemed to Joel that such a plot might also describe the start of a small winery. As he drove away… the setting sun squeezed beneath the clouds, igniting the landscape a surreal orange and painting two rainbows on the charcoal sky. In Joel’s mind Sir Walter Scott receded and Native Americans appeared as he recalled an Indian legend wherein man is discovered in a pod, and is instructed in the arts of survival by a raven.”

Ravenswood – Gothic birth of an iconic producer

Joel Peterson is a great survivor himself. The gestation of his Ravenswood brand might sound fuelled by waccy backy – this was seventies California after all – but Joel’s ‘drug of choice’ was always a certain heady, tannic red made from the State’s bedrock grape. Zinfandel is a thin-skinned, small grape which means less skin-to-juice ratio, so potentially higher tannins. It is also  notorious for uneven ripening, so bunches have to be left on the vine to ripen fully. This leads to high sugar in the berries, which makes for high-alcohol wines. Hence a now discredited trend for late harvest Zins, dry and sweet.

Peterson never went down that route. 600 cases were made from that initial harvest. After which he became a gypsy winemaker around the area until he eventually could create a winery of his own. His pride and joy were the single vineyard Zins he made, lauded by the likes of Robert Parker. The plan was for small open top, redwood fermenters, hand punch downs, extended macerations, native yeast, gentle transfer, minimal processing and small French oak aging – all done by hand. European with a Californian twist.

But he admits in the book that their ‘Chateau Cash Flow’ was the generic Ravenswood Vintners Blend, the cheaper early release version. Launched in 1983, annual production neared one million cases, at one point, making it the world’s  bestselling red Zinfandel. You’d find it in Morrisons and Tesco, maybe still can.  Dwarfed, though, by the big guns who dug a gold mine in creating White Zinfandel Blush. But that’s a whole other story.

Ravenswood itself was engulfed by drinks behemoths. first Constellation Brands and then on to Gallo (California-based, it’s the largest wine producer by volume on the planet). Ravenswood then went into limbo and Peterson founded a new boutique winery, Once & Future, to recapture the magic of Zinfandel, and his son, Morgan Twain-Peterson, became a Master of Wine with his own highly regarded winery, Bedrock Wine Co.

Serendipity that led me back to top-end Zinfandel

So is it a case of the Zinfandel Empire fights back? Ironically Gallo have resurrected Ravenswood as a fine Zinfandel with an initial annual production of 6,000 cases with Peterson as consultant. For his own project he remains an inveterate searcher out of off-the-radar old vine parcels. Hence the Wine Society bottle I’m about to sample. This latest example of their flagship ‘Exhibition’ range is the result of an abundant 2024 vintage leaving Peterson with more Zinfandel than usual. 

This bespoke blend lives up to its Society tasting notes: “With an average vine age of over 80 years, this full-flavoured, vibrant Zinfandel has a rich cherry, plum and blackberry perfume, bright acidity with rich soft tannins, and an evolving long finish. Made in small open top fermenters, and aged in about 10 per cent new oak the resulting wine has great balance and generosity.”

So quite a step up from the Vintners Blend. Beautifully balanced, it still weighs in at nearly 15 per cent ABV, but it wears the alcohol lightly. It proved a perfect accompaniment to a hot game pie. Serendipity? The special offer (£16) came into my e-mail box just the day after Angels’ Visits dropped through the letter box. I’d bought the book on a whim after it was extolled in the Substack of one of my favourite wine writers. Anyone who shares a podcast (Intoxicating History) with Tom Parker Bowles must be posh but Henry Jeffreys is a sharp and streetwise advocate of all things grape.

Grape rivals – Ridge Vineyards versus Ravenswood

I was captivated by Angels’ Visits because it tells stories of individual, very individual, Californian winemakers who have championed the Big Zin since the Sixties… and their vastly contrasting wine styles.. Essentially, though, it centres on Peterson’s Ravenswood and arch rivals, in the Santa Cruz Mountains (main picture) south of San Francisco, Ridge Vineyards. Their Zinfandels under well-travelled philosopher winemaker Paul Ridge aimed for a Bordeaux-style elegance over power. Matching its signature wine, the Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon. Draper, who turns 90 in March, has long been Emeritus.but his cerebral approach remains under the hands-off ownership of a Japanese pharmaceutical giant.

Last year I tasted half a dozen Ridge wines at a Berkmann Cellars trade event in Manchester – Zinfandels from their Lytton Springs and Geyserville particularly captivating, if just a mite polite. Angels’ Visits author Darlington does stray into  Jungian parlance of Apollo versus Dionysus. I see where he is coming from. His historical research into how Zinfandel wound up in the Golden State is more plodding. The jury really is out on whether it is the same grape as  – or a close relative of – the similarly thick-skinned Primitivo of Puglia in Italy.

He does debunk the once accepted theory that it came from Hungary or Croatia  via the colourful founder of Buena Vista winery, California’s first, dating back to 1857. Colonel Agoston Haraszthy’s portrait still hangs in their Sonoma base. The grape was also, quite boringly, believed to have originally been a table grape in New England.

When Haraszthy went bust he hopped off to Nicaragua to make spirits from sugar and met a bizarre end. Over to Angels’ Visits again: “On July 6. 1869 he went to meet a business associate on the banks of a Nicaraguan river. He never returned. His footprints were found leading to a tree whose limbs reached across the river: 

one of th/e branches, broken off in the middle, was presumed to have snapped as Haraszthy tried to cross on it.

“A few days earlier at the same spot a crocodile  had killed a cow, and to this day Agoston Haraszthy is assumed to have followed the unlucky bovine into the jaws of oblivion.”