2022 Corti Zinfandel Amador County
On a spring day in 1968, a few wine enthusiasts gathered for a picnic at Ken Deaver’s vineyard in Amador County’s Shenandoah Valley. One of them was Bob Trinchero, winemaker for his family’s Sutter Home Winery in Napa Valley. Another was Sacramento grocer Darrell Corti, who had brought along unassuming bottles of 1965 and 1966 zinfandels. They were made by Corti’s pal, home winemaker Charles Myers, an English teacher at Sacramento City College who also joined the party. What happened next turned out to be a pivotal moment in California’s modern wine history. Over cold cuts and bread, Corti poured the zinfandels. Trinchero liked them so much he struck a deal with Deaver to start buying zinfandel from his vineyard.
Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/food-drink/wine/dunne-on-wine/article112298027.html#storylink=cpy
This is a very pretty zinfandel. It is not a zinfandel for the ages, but a delicious drinking wine that will be enjoyable for some time and will give a lot of pleasure. Right now, this is the kind of wine I like to drink. It is not a wine to “make old bones with,” and it is probably not what a lot of zinfandel lovers want to see in the grape. But it is delicious and a bottle in two people may not be enough wine. But it is a very valid style, rarely, if ever found in the area and a stroke of luck in getting it made. With wine, as in life, sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t. This is a winner. - "Darrel Corti"
“This is very comparable,” Corti said of the finished wine. “It has very pretty fruit, which is one of the charms of zinfandel. Before 1968, zinfandel always made a light wine, but it was a wine that would keep. With age, those wines were almost like old Bordeaux.” Ironically, the wine isn’t in a high-shouldered Bordeaux bottle, which is the California custom. Instead, Corti chose a slope-shouldered Burgundy bottle, which was Myers’ practice. In contrast to the Myers’ way, however, the bottles are topped with screwcaps, not corks. “Charles didn’t use screwcaps for his wines but he wasn’t averse to them,” Corti says. But the most striking aspect of the bottle is its label art, a 1963 painting by Sacramento artist Wayne Thiebaud called “Man Reading.” The man in the painting wears a suit and tie, sits on a spindly chair, and is so bent and engrossed in his book that the top of his bald head dominates his features. The model, then as now, was Charles Myers.
Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/food-drink/wine/dunne-on-wine/article112298027.html#storylink=cpy
After Myers died last year at 85, Corti found the notebook in a stack of books at the family’s estate sale and paid Myers’ daughter Margaret $2 for the journal. In it, Myers outlined how he made his first zinfandel from the Deaver vineyard in 1965. While he didn’t say was how much he paid Deaver for the 500 pounds of grapes, he noted that zinfandel from the vineyard was selling for $75 a ton at the time. Today, zinfandel in the same area can command more than $2,000 a ton.
Corti handed Myers’ journal to Andis winemaking Team and asked them to make a zinfandel in accord with the steps Myers took in 1965.
