2005 Quaglia Zinfandel

Quaglia Vineyard is actually two separate vineyards here in St. Helena, about a mile apart. One parcel is on Spring Street on the west side of town; the other is on Pratt Avenue, just north of town. Both have been in the Quaglia family for more than seventy years and both sport beautiful and gnarly old head-pruned vines, some over eighty years old. When Ray Quaglia’s forefathers acquired this land in the early 1930s, it had already been farmed for fifty years by the Valley’s early Italian growers who customarily planted “field blends”—different grape varieties alongside each other which, when picked altogether, produced the blend that was desired in the bottle. The more common practice today is to isolate each grape’s harvest and allow the winemaker to practice the art of blending. Needless to say, most of the vines are Zinfandel, but there are varying amounts of Petite Sirah and Carignane throughout the vineyard as well, for added color and flavor complexity.