The story starts with a square of land, 1320 feet by 1320 feet. It’s the tale of an immigrant family and a world-changing invention, and it carries on today through Matt Cline’s Three Wine Company, which stands as a monument to California’s viticultural history.

Just over a century ago, Matt’s grandfather, Valeriano Jacuzzi, took a trip to the United States. He was just a teen, and after returning to his native Italy for three years, he headed back to the US with his wife and child—people did things a lot faster back then, Matt always says. Jacuzzi then claimed his piece of the American Dream: a quarter acre of land in an unincorporated area of Oakley, California.

Booze was banned in the US at the time, but families were allowed to make a limited amount of wine for personal consumption—and Oakley grapes were always the first to get snapped up at the fruit stand, even though they cost a buck more per box. The sandy soils of Oakley were perfect for producing balanced crops—something the immigrant families that planted vineyards there knew about a half-century before the intrepid Jacuzzi arrived.

Jacuzzi went on to open a machine shop in Berkeley and built the engine for the first biplane to take off from a battleship. Eventually, he would develop the submersible pump—an invention that would have an impact all over the world and make the Jacuzzi name famous. But the value of his chosen home in the US would not be lost on his grandson.

After graduating from UC Berkeley and UC Davis, Matt turned his winemaking focus to Contra Costa County, which feels a million miles away from California’s big-money wine country. The area is now known for suburban sprawl, but between the high-rises and strip malls there are irreplaceable gems of vineyards—and no one has worked harder than Cline to maintain these portals into the Contra Costa of yore.

In Matt’s favored sites, everything is sand, and huge, gnarled vines the size of small trees reach up, craning skyward in shapes that defy modern viticulture and would make most Napa vineyard managers cringe. The rows—or what passes for rows—were planted to Mataro (Mourvedre), Carignan, Zinfandel, and Malvasia Nera using six-inch sticks called “budwood, which were hauled in buggies from the old Buena Vista Winery to Contra Costa 100–125 years ago. Each was hand-twisted into the Delhi sand by Portuguese and Italian immigrant families with names like Spinelli, Lucchesi, Evangelho, and Jacuzzi, who then made traditional “field-blend” wines pioneered by early farmers across Europe.

Matt’s “Big Three” sites—Evangelho, Bigelow, and Mazzoni-Live Oak—all top a century in age, and their venerable vines still eke out a few clusters every year, the tiny berries packed with dense red-fruit concentration. These are some of the oldest vines in the United States, and with Matt as their steward, they provide the raw material for his iconic bottlings, each of which offers a fascinating taste of the past.