2013 Three Wine Company Old Vines Zinfandel Contra Costa County 750 ml

CC Sabathia, The Big Three, and 92-Point Lap Dogs

The email from Matt Cline was one of the more surprising of our eight-year tenure at WineAccess. Since the early 1980s, when Matt first discovered the Evangelho, Live Oak, and Spinelli vineyards strewn with ancient head-trained Zinfandel vines first planted in the late 1800s, Cline has followed the lead of his mentors — Joel Peterson of Ravenswood and Paul Draper at Ridge.

While perfectly respectful of the work of Wine Spectator, Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, and Wine Enthusiast, we’ve never known Cline to submit one of his wines to the critics. Over the last several years, we can recall a couple of evenings at the Cline dinner table when Erin Cline, Matt’s “Far Better Half,” a transplanted New Yorker, minced no words when describing her husband’s insistence on eschewing the critical limelight.

“Distributors are like lap dogs. Give them a bone and they wag their tails,” Erin said, not so gently pressing her fork against her husband’s third rib. “Last I checked, the only bones they chew on are 90-point scores. Why not give them what they want, HONEY???”

So it was, on the Tuesday just after last year’s Memorial Day weekend, as Erin’s Yankees dropped a second consecutive game to the Blue Jays, spoiling a splendid outing by C.C. Sabathia in an otherwise mediocre season, that Erin Cline took matters into her own hands. She made a few calls to the “Big Three,” packaged up a bottle of each of her husband’s 2013 old-vine Zinfandels, added a nice handwritten note and corresponding tech sheets, and jumped into her SUV en route to the UPS store.

On a sunny Wednesday afternoon last June, Erin got the call she was waiting for from one of the Big Three. Then she called Matt, who was ankle-deep in Delhi sand on the dunes of the 122-year-old Evangelho Vineyard. “Honey, just wanted to tell you that I picked up a couple of bones for the lap dogs!!”

Drawn from the second consecutive drought year in Contra Costa, barely a drop of rain fell from the beginning of February 2013 to the end of August. Despite the arid conditions, daytime highs hovered in the mid-80s while nights remained cool, a diurnal temperature shift that explained both the high sugars and firm acidity at harvest.

Zinfandel, Matt has always contended, is a capricious variety. In nearly every vintage, on the same cluster, you’ll find desiccated, perfectly ripe, and underripe berries, requiring rigorous hand-sorting on the sorting table. But in the first week of September 2013, Matt told us he was tempted to fold up the sorting table: “There was nothing to discard. The clusters were perfectly formed.”

The 2013 Three Zinfandel Old Vines is an absolute blockbuster, as Matt says, “one of the brawniest Zins I’ve ever made, but also the most balanced.” Purple-black in hue. Explosive aromatically, featuring a plush, high-toned mix of crushed red and black fruits, violets, graphite, and sweet spice. Rich, powerfully structured, dense, yet with exquisite fruit purity, packed with blackberry and black raspberry jam, finishing with sturdy backbone that argues for an 8- to 12-year slumber in the coolest of cellars.

To Erin Cline’s satisfaction and Matt’s chagrin, 92 points from Wine Enthusiast, which gushed over its “super-concentrated” flavors of “chocolate cherries” and “blackberry syrup,” then marveled over its “nice and dry” style. Released at $25. Just $16.99 per bottle, which makes this 92-point bone that much more enticing.