2009 Zinfandel Papera Ranch

This is a fabulous set of wines from Mike Office and Carlisle. Best of all, the wines remain very reasonably priced considering the quality and passion that goes into the bottle. Along with Morgan Twain-Peterson of Bedrock, Mike Officer is focused on seeking out the finest old-vine sites in California, which have either been neglected over the years, or are being bought by large-scale wineries who have little interest in discovering the quirks of these very old vineyards, most of which are planted with field blends that truly harken back to another era. The wines are made with indigenous yeasts and aged in French oak barrels, usually in the 20-30% range. I tasted all of the 2010s from barrel the day before they were scheduled to be moved into tank.

Mike Officer's excitement about the 2009 vintage matched that of just about every other producer I visited in March. "It was kind of unbelievable, actually, especially with a painful year like '08 fresh in our minds," he told me. "The lack of heat spikes meant we were able to watch sugar levels rise without freaking out that they'd scream up or that acid levels would drop out." He said that while "perfection is probably not attainable, philosophically, I do have an idea what it might look like and '09, as a growing season, might have been it, save for a lot of rain in the middle of October." Almost of Officer's grapes had long been picked when the first major storm of the fall (Typhoon Melor, which dumped over 6 inches of rain on the region) hit on October 13th, though. Grapes that he hadn't picked were left hanging until the end of the month, "and we had to be really selective with those."