NV Bedrock Wine Company The Whole Shebang Seventeenth Cuvee Red Wine 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. 

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. Working with these plots 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.

At his Bedrock winery, a staggering 80% of the vines that Twain-Peterson—the SF Chronicle’s 2014 Co-Winemaker of the Year—and his team work with are at least 80 years old. It’s an impressive commitment to quality, and it shows in the prices that Zin nuts are willing to pay for Bedrock wines. 

Bedrock’s The Whole Shebang label stands on the other end of the affordability spectrum as their collectible Zins, and it’s meant to be the bottle you open without hesitation to keep the party going. It’s a wine whose inspiration lies with France’s humble yet legendary Côtes du Rhône category, which has a worldwide reputation for delighting and impressing at a reasonable price point. 

Of course, this is Bedrock, California’s “mixed blacks” take center stage: Zin, Carignan, Syrah, Petite Sirah, Mataro, and other Mediterranean grapes are what you’re tasting here. The wine is made entirely in the Bedrock cellars, with most of the lots fermented on native yeasts and native malolactic strains, aged in a combination of neutral oak and tank. 

Oh, and the fruit: Of course it comes from old vineyards—plots that Bedrock is rehabbing—along with some younger-vine parcels, plus barrels of legit Bedrock juice that for one reason or another don’t fit into the plans they’ve got for their higher-end wines. Since the wine is multi-vintage, the Bedrock team has maximum choice of what to put in the blend, whether it’s a lot from this vintage or a barrel of prime Nervo Zin that has been cooling its heels in barrel for the past 12 months. 

The result is one of the greatest values in the state of California, a wine we love to pop open with ribs off the grill, duck confit out of a Lodge skillet, or by the fire with Fables of the Reconstruction on the turntable. Delicious in all contexts.