2023 Bedrock Wine Company Zinfandel Beeson Ranch Dry Creek Valley 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—works with are at least 80 years old. And one sip of the intense and elegant 96-point 2023 Beeson Ranch Zin shows that the time and treasure they devote to California’s most historic vineyard sites is well worth it.

Bedrock has worked with Beeson Ranch only since the 2021 vintage. The site, a steep amphitheater on the southwestern edge of Dry Creek Valley, boasts a mix of Boomer and Josephine loams, the reddish, silty soils flecked with quartz crystal and other volcanic rocks. 

The blocks at Beeson, which were planted in the early 1900s, are mostly Zinfandel, but with some Grenache and Petite Sirah mixed in (they weren’t quite as precise back in those days). The vineyard differs from Dry Creek’s typical dry, brushy terroir with its massive redwood trees that stand at the top, surrounded by the kind of lush flora that you see in California’s famous Redwood forests. This type of mixed terroir—scrubby low-water plants brushing shoulders with deep, verdant, moisture-loving plants—translates in the glass as a wine of supreme breadth and elegance. 

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.