2022 Saini Vineyards Zinfandel Olive Block Old Vine Dry Creek Valley 750 ml

The Saini family has long supplied top-flight Zinfandel to Sonoma County’s best wineries. Their flagship Olive Block Zin comes from their finest patch of vines, a 83-year-old parcel that produces a tiny amount of gorgeously concentrated fruit. In the outstanding 2022 vintage, it produced an absolute blockbuster. 

Olive Block is always Saini’s most intense wine, and this one’s awash in blackberry bramble, raspberry coulis, and huckleberry accented by crushed black pepper, dusty herbs, and a hint of olive leaf. It’s generous and layered on the palate—a first-rate Zin that shows what old vines are all about. 

You’ll find this on the list at Charlie Palmer’s Dry Creek Kitchen, but barely a drop makes it outside of Sonoma County. There’s just not enough to go around. But thanks to our friendship with Saini, we’ve got this blue-chip bottle at an incredible discount.

Even in this era of everything-everywhere globalization, wines like Saini’s Olive Block Zin remain stubbornly local. Why? There’s simply not enough to escape Sonoma County, after places like the iconic Big John’s Market and celebrity chef Charlie Palmer’s Dry Creek Kitchen have taken their cut. 

The Saini family’s reputation in Sonoma County is far bigger than their name recognition outside of it. For most of the last century, they’ve supplied some of the finest Zinfandel in California to HUGE Zin names. Legendary winemaker Ted Seghesio, in Wine Spectator, once shared his opinion that Saini Zin was the best available in the world. 

It was 1917 when Michele Saini and his brother-in-law John Cuneo bought 80 acres in Healdsburg, now home to one the hottest dining scenes on the West Coast. Then as now, Healdsburg was an agricultural paradise, and the pair thrived, growing pears, prunes, apples, and wine grapes—and skirting Prohibition by making wine for themselves and their friends, plus selling to the church. 

The partnership continued until the 1980s, when the Saini family bought out the Cuneos. Now they’re one of the most important growers in Sonoma County, working 320 acres in Dry Creek Valley and Alexander Valley, and selling nearly all of their Zinfandel to the iconic Seghesio and their old-vine program. 

In 2008, the family decided to bottle and label wines from their vines, and the one they started with was the Olive Block. Not even three acres, the block was planted back in 1942, with cuttings from vines brought over from Italy. That first year, they made just 100 cases. The block is so small, the yields are so low, that only about 300 cases are possible.