Lopez Vineyard - Dry-Farmed, Organic, Over 100 Years Old

Harvest Is Here

We got the call on Monday. Time to pick grapes from the dry-farmed, century-old, certified organic vines of Lopez Vineyard.
 

photo of dry-farmed, ancient vines, certified organic, in Lopez Vineyard

We started washing equipment, reserving a truck, canceling existing plans and making new ones.

Harvest is always a surprise. By mid-summer, we’re drifting along, lulled into dreaminess by the steady, quiet pull of the flow, not realizing we’re in a current that’s about to take us over the falls in a barrel. By the time we hear the roar, it’s too late to swim for shore. Nor do we want to. That plunge is half the fun.

But this harvest is more surprising than usual. It’s about 3 weeks earlier than the average.

I sent an email just before the Super Bowl this year, talking about how the abnormally early heat was causing an abnormally early start to the growing season. Well, harvest is following right along on the same abnormally early timeline.

Maybe “abnormal” is the wrong word to use, going forward. But I hate the term “the new normal.”

I think of life as like a child struggling to carry a large bucket full to the brim of water and almost too heavy to lift, spilling out joy and tragedy with each rushing, sloshing, stumbling step.

There are pros and cons to a growing season that starts early and finishes early.

One of the pros is that this means the grapes ripen and achieve maturity in the cooler earlier part of the year, before the crazy heat that usually comes in August and September here in Southern California. Milder weather allows for more even ripening, more balanced and complex flavors.

One of the cons is, well, climate change.
 

photo of ancient dry-farmed certified organic Zinfandel bush vines in the Lopez Vineyard in Los Angeles with rocky sandy soil

Lopez Vineyard

If you visited the Lopez Vineyard, you’d likely initially be underwhelmed. It looks like a giant vacant lot next to a freeway interchange that was supposed to be developed into a suburban neighborhood, but the plans got held up at City Hall and a bunch of viney weeds began to grow.

When you think of something that has lived through two world wars, dust bowls, great depressions, and two global pandemics, and everything that happened in between, you might expect something a little more… Grand? Noble? Monumental?

These are scrappy, scrubby little knee-high shrubs without trellising, nearly overwhelmed by weeds, hunkered down in the rocky sand. No thick trunks. No effusive displays of foliage. They look completely unremarkable.

Millions of people drive by them every year on two large freeways that were still decades away from being built when the vines were planted. The freeways overlook the vineyard, and most drivers overlook the vines entirely.

But we don’t want to make wine from anywhere else.
 

photo of a old vine zinfandel cucumonga valley certified organic dry-farmed ancient vines from with cluster of grapes

Like icebergs… and most of us… the vines only seem insignificant on the surface. Underneath they are deeply connected to history, culture, and all kinds of hidden aquifers (literal and metaphoric) that allow them to thrive.

As we stood among the 300 some acres of bush vines stretching out toward the base of the Angeles Mountains, we couldn’t help but be awed by their ability to abundantly produce their grapes year after year for over a hundred years.

Have you ever seen one of those displays about nuclear energy? A pound of dirt in a glass box has a caption something like, “If we could release the energy in this pound of dirt, we could power a city of a million people for a week.”

These vines make me think they have found the secret to unlock that energy.

The Lopez Vineyard is pruned each year. Other than that the vines are not watered by anything but the 5-10 inches of winter rains and underground aquifers, nor are they sprayed or fertilized with anything.

Yet every year they offer up around 300 tons of grapes. They are a true Giving Tree.

As wonderful as the vines themselves are, it would be unfair not to give credit to the viticultural wisdom of the humans who planted them originally.

The folks who planted Lopez Vineyard (circa 1912-1916) knew the heat and aridity would keep the pressure from mildews, mold, and insect pests at a minimum. They knew that, despite the dry climate, runoff from the nearby mountains would provide a reliable source of groundwater just a few feet down. They knew that the rocky, sandy soil would prevent these own-rooted vinifera vines from succumbing to root pests and rots.

And they knew that all of these factors gave just enough to allow the vines to live with very little human input, but not too much, so that the vines would have to struggle and overcome these environmental stresses, and this would produce delicious wine for over a century.

Hats off to those folks.
 

photo of the Centralas harvest crew standing in the Lopez Vineyard in Cucumonga Valley surrounded by 115 year old zinfandel vines that are dry farmed, certified organic bush vines

And hats off to these folks. They picked the Zinfandel grapes that Wendy and I spent the rest of the day processing yesterday. They stooped and crouched and picked about two acres, 1.5 tons of grapes, by hand with no knives, hooks, pruning shears or tools of any kind, in less than 2 hours.

The 2022 grapes are now in the winery and already in the process of becoming a couple different wines. We are attempting a 00000 wine this year.

You may have heard of 00 (zero-zero) wine. It stands for nothing added, nothing taken away… as in no ingredients used other than grapes, and no filtering or fining of any kind.

00000 takes this to another level: zero additives in the vineyard (no sprays nor fertilizers), zero irrigation, zero additives in the winery (just grapes), no filtering nor fining, AND zero exploitation of humans to produce the wine.

We aren’t purists. It’s more that we love a challenge.

We’re going to monitor the wine closely, and we may add sulfur if we think it is necessary to prevent the wine from turning to vinegar or spoiling in some other way. Now that we have a sense of the cultural history that we've become a small part of, we've begun to really not want to screw it up!

We’ll be bottling the 2021 Lopez Vineyard Zinfandel in about a month, and it will be available later in the fall. It’s a massive, succulent red that also tastes fresh and vibrant. We think you’ll love it. (It's a quadruple zero... we did add a little sulfur.)

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The Future of Wine is Change: Re-Thinking Our Varietal Obsession