Please review our shipping policy, we are limited to where we can ship to due to state licensing laws.
Your cart is currently empty
Product image slideshow Items
Intensely aromatic old-vine Zinfandel: boysenberry, black plum and blackberry with rose petal and crushed flowers, sage, mint, chocolate, black tea, leather and tobacco. Silky, graceful and layered, with stony minerality and a long, dusty finish.
Available in store
Close80% Zinfandel, 10% Carignane, 10% Alicante Bouschet
Food pairings: Lamb lollipops and roast lamb, barbecue beef brisket, pork roast with potatoes, roast chicken, and homemade pasta with a rich meat sauce.
Scores:
Winemaking: Once & Future is old-school winemaking at its best. The grapes from the head-pruned vines are fermented in small, open-top redwood fermenters with native yeast and punched down by hand, with extended macerations, followed by malolactic fermentation on indigenous bacteria. The wine is moved gently, processed minimally and aged in small French oak barrels.
Vineyards and terroir: Teldeschi Vineyard lies in the heart of Dry Creek Valley on the Eastside bench land, which Joel Peterson considers the best location in a valley that might be one of the best places in the world to grow Zinfandel. The Teldeschis, an Italian family, have farmed their part of the valley since the early 1900s. Frank's Block was Frank Teldeschi's favourite: a small, mixed block in cobbly Tuscan Red Hill series soils, planted in 1904 and the oldest on the ranch. Its old head-pruned vines give only about a ton and a half per acre, and their Carignane and Alicante Bouschet add character to the Zinfandel.
Winemaker history: Joel Peterson learned winemaking from Joe Swan in the early 1970s and founded Ravenswood in 1976, making single-vineyard Zinfandels from old vines that helped redefine what California's old vineyards could achieve. In the early 1980s a long lunch with Frank and Caterina Teldeschi and their sons ended with a handshake deal for four tons of grapes and a friendship of more than 36 years, and Teldeschi became one of Ravenswood's most successful and awarded single-vineyard wines. A co-founder of ZAP (Zinfandel Advocates and Producers), a supporter of the Historic Vineyard Society and a member of the Vintners Hall of Fame, Joel later started Once & Future as a return to his original vision for Ravenswood: small lots from special old vineyards, made by hand. Bottling Frank's Block on its own honours Frank and that long friendship. His son, Morgan Twain-Peterson, runs Bedrock Wine Company.
In the pictures: Joel Peterson among old vines; gnarled old vines in spring (photos courtesy of Once & Future via its importer Polaner Selections); and vineyards in Dry Creek Valley (photo: Naotake Murayama, 2008, CC BY 2.0).
