Lodi seasons (2019 and 2020), a pictorial essay

August 2020: moments before dawn this past week in Lodi's Vino Farms, a mechanical harvester gets maintenance work after a night of grape picking

To everything there is a season. Especially at the start of each year's harvest, which is the height — the culmination — of all seasons. At least in Lodi, America's largest winegrowing region.

Lodi is the largest because most of its wine grapes go into wines that most Americans actually drink. The bottlings you see on the grocery store or volume retail shelves, landing in the shopping cart. These, admittedly, are wines that are more like "products" reflecting consumers' expectations of varietals or brands, often with eye catching labels...

Aug 27, 2020 at 1:00 PM Permalink

Lodi's Rescue Dog Wines get to the heart of what matters in wine (a quality of life)

Rescue Dog Wines proprietors Laura and Blair Lott in their Acampo Rd. vineyard home

Blair and Laura Lott got the hankering to escape the "insanity" of living and working in the Bay Area. "The traffic just got crazier," Mr. Lott tells us, "and we didn't think we could go on like this."

And so the couple sold their very successful business (Massage Envy) and embarked on arguably an even crazier new career: as wine producers.

"We looked everywhere from Paso Robles to Napa Valley for vineyard and winery properties to buy," says Mr. Lott, "and someone suggested, have you considered Lodi?... check it out, it's fantastic."

The Lotts followed suit, liked what they saw, and settled on a 19.5-acre property with a home and old vines (since pulled out and replaced with new, trellised vines) on Acampo Rd. That was in 2016. They didn't waste time establishing their wine brand, because they also decided to do this in a way that follows their heart — their love of dogs...

Aug 25, 2020 at 9:00 AM Permalink

Strong case for Lodi terroir (part 3) — soil and topography

Linden Hills Vineyard located south of Calaveras River at the lowest reaches of the lower foothills area skirting the eastern edge of the Lodi AVA, where gravelly clay, hillside Redding series soils predominate

Continued from: Strong case for Lodi terroir (part 2) — the climatic factors

The Language of Terroir Establishing the Lodi AVA

When the petition submitted to the federal government proposing the establishment of a Lodi AVA was submitted in 1982, it was noted that the viticultural area historically known as Lodi consisted of approximately 39,000 acres of vineyards and 15 bonded wineries. Today those numbers are up to just over 100,000 acres of planted vineyards, and 85 wineries.

In the 1986 Federal Register document acknowledging the final approval of the Lodi AVA, the appellation is described as "an inland area that is comprised mainly of alluvial fan, flood plain lands, and lower and higher terrace lands..." 

Aug 20, 2020 at 9:00 AM Permalink

Lodi vines whisper what's happening with the 2020 vintage

McCay Cellars owner/grower/winemaker Mike McCay in his Lot 13 Vineyard (own-rooted Zinfandel planted in 1915) at the break of dawn on August 11, 2020

Earlier this week (August 11, 2020) we asked to tag along with McCay Cellars owner/grower Mike McCay during part of his early morning vineyard walks. 

Typical of most of 2020's summer days so far, the early morning started off in the lower 60°s, barely hitting 72° by 9:00 AM. Perfect morning constitution weather. Weather is dry as a bone with high wispy clouds at the most, and the gentle breeze blowing in from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta has been consistent during the early morning hours, picking up at the end of each day. Lodi winegrowing weather...

Aug 13, 2020 at 10:00 AM Permalink

Strong case for Lodi terroir (part 2) — the climatic factors

The same deep (50 to 90-ft.), rich sandy loam soil hospitable to deeply rooted valley oaks endemic to Mokelumne-Cosumnes River Watershed (depicted here in the 32-acre grove preserved by the Spenker family of Lodi's Jessie's Grove estate) constitutes the terroir that made own-rooted European grapevines so easy to grow by Lodi's pioneering farmers in the mid-1800s

Natural Environment Conducive to Grapes

Part 2 of our discourse on Lodi terroir is for the technically minded wine geeks out there, looking for the no frills answer to the question: What are the physical factors of the Lodi AVA that have a direct impact on the "sense of place" found in more and more of Lodi's handcraft style wines, strongly influencing the decisions made by growers and vintners?

The land occupied by the Lodi appellation, of course, existed long before trappers encountered the native Plains Miwok tribe in the early 1800s; and before the first enterprising farmers of European descent began putting down roots towards the end of the 1840s... 

Aug 10, 2020 at 9:00 AM Permalink

A strong case for Lodi terroir (part 1)

Deep, almost powdery, ultra fine crushed granite soil (i.e. loamy sand) in Harney Lane Winery's Scottsdale Vineyard, a medium that produces distinctive, terroir driven Chardonnay as well as ancient vine Zinfandel (the latter, planted in early 1900s)

What is terroir and why should you care?

Answer to second part first: Because terroir differentiates Lodi from any other region in the world; and as Mr. Rogers always used to say, "There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are."

The first part might be harder because it's a French word, and translations of French words are not always literal. There is, perhaps, no greater international authority on all things wine related than British wine author Jancis Robinson. To quote her benchmark Oxford Companion to Wine:

Major components of terroir are soil (as the word suggests) and local topography, together with their interactions with each other and with macroclimate to determine mesoclimate and vine microclimate. The holistic combination of all these is held to give each site its own unique terroir, which is reflected in its wines more or less consistently from year to year, to some degree regardless of variations in methods of viticulture and wine-making...

Aug 7, 2020 at 11:00 AM Permalink

George West — the long forgotten Father of the Lodi winegrowing industry

Idyllic rendering of Stockton's El Pinal Winery and vineyard estate a short time after 1858, when the winery was founded (image from the Dr. Dean L. Mawdsley collection, California State Library)

You won't find his name mentioned in most of the popular books touching upon the history of California wine. No Wikipedia entry, and nary an illustration or photograph to be found in "the Google." Why? From what we gather, he was a pioneer who rested more on his labors than his laurels. Also, probably because he didn't do his work in Napa Valley, Sonoma County or even the Santa Cruz Mountains. Yet in many ways, the visionary endeavors of George West, the founder of Stockton's El Pinal Winery, had as much impact on the entire California wine industry as any one individual... 

Aug 4, 2020 at 3:00 PM Permalink

m2's latest wines personify Lodi's beautifully distinct sense of place

m2's Layne Montgomery in Soucie Vineyard, a quintessential, own-rooted ancient vine Lodi Zinfandel growth planted in 1916

The growth and success of Lodi's m2 Wines has been intertwined with Soucie Vineyard, located at the farthest western edge of Lodi's Mokelumne River AVA, ever since this artisanal winery's founding in 2002.

m2 owner/winemaker Layne Montgomery has never been shy about saying, as-a-matter-of-factly, that "if Zinfandel is considered America's grape, Lodi is considered the home of California Zinfandel, and Soucie is one of Lodi's three or four best Zinfandel vineyards, then these are some of the finest Zinfandels in the world..."

Jul 29, 2020 at 1:00 PM Permalink

July veraison and the ultimate beauty of old to ancient vines

Mid-July 2020 veraison in Manassero Vineyard's old vine Grenache block, planted in the 1940s on the west side of Lodi's Mokelumne River appellation

As we've reached the middle and end of July, Lodi wine country has been experiencing a period of time known in wine lingo as veraison: a word derived from the French term véraison, referring to the “change of color of grape berries.” Call it the annual coming of age for grapevines, or a vinous bar mitzvah for grapes. 

For black skinned grapes grown for red wines, veraison usually happens in a spectacular blaze of colors, from greens and yellows to reds and purplish blues and blacks. But it’s not just the transitioning of hues that farmers see in their vineyards during this time of year. It is also a signal that grapes have reached a mid-point of maturation... 

Jul 23, 2020 at 10:00 AM Permalink

For summer sipping and shopping, a list of Lodi's finest whites for other-white-meats

2020 Kerner grapes five to six weeks from harvest in Lodi's Mokelumne Glen Vineyards

Forty or fifty years ago, shopping for a white wine to go with tonight's dinner used to be so easy. All you needed to do was look on the backsides of the wine bottles on the shelves.

Typical generic California "Chablis," for instance, was "recommended with fish, fowl, or veal." A "Burgundy" was for "beef, lamb or pasta." A personal favorite was the old Almadén brand of Grenache rosé — we used to drink gallons (or as they were called, "jugs") of that stuff. It was an off-dry pink wine that, as its back label strongly suggested with a gaily marching chicken, pig, fish and cow, could "complement any meal." Of course, that never stopped us from enjoying it with or without meals, preferably with ice cubes!

Jul 21, 2020 at 7:00 AM Permalink