2022 Bedrock Wine Company Old Vine Zinfandel California 750 ml

Chances are your average winemaker would call vines aged 40 to 60 years “old.” And chances are Morgan Twain-Peterson wouldn’t touch ‘em. 

A staggering 80% of the vines that Twain-Peterson—the SF Chronicle’s 2014 Co-Winemaker of the Year—and his Bedrock team work with are 80+ years old. And one sip of their vivacious, gorgeously concentrated 2022 Old Vine Zinfandel shows that the time and treasure they devote to California’s most historic vineyards is well worth it.

Called a “world-class performer” by Robert Parker, Bedrock is California’s new Zinfandel icon, and this bottle is drawn off many century-plus-old sites that go into the winery’s more expensive single-site bottlings—Sonoma’s Bedrock Vineyard, Contra Costa’s Evangelho, and Alexander Valley’s Nervo among them. 

Twain-Peterson is one of the primary forces behind a growing group of winemakers dedicated to finding, restoring, and preserving historic vineyards, then crafting wines that express the sites’ profundity. His experience working with these plots and ushering their grapes into bottle has made him a believer not just in the idea that older vines yield more-concentrated grapes, but that time itself selects only the best vines for survival.

“If a vineyard has lasted through two world wars [and] Prohibition,” Twain-Peterson has said, “it must be special.” The 2022 Old Vine Zin comes partially from Twain-Peterson’s Bedrock Vineyard, which boasts vines up to 130 years old. They also tapped historic California sites like Teldeschi, Evanghelho, Katushas, Nervo, Sodini, Beeson, and Papera. 

A few years ago, we dubbed Bedrock Wine Company one of the hottest brands in California. Since then, they’ve leaped from incandescent to iconic. They’ve reached the pinnacle of California Zinfandel production, standing alongside luminaries such as Ridge, Biale, and Turley.