San Lorenzo

The San Lorenzo vineyard was bought by Pete Seghesio's grandfather in 1896, with ten gold coins he had earned working as a cook for the gold mines. Old deeds suggest the vines were planted before 1892. The site sits next to Pete's home, which has a small cellar beneath it.

The Pearl is drawn from that century-old field blend: 69% Zinfandel, 15% Petite Sirah, 5% Carignan and 10% mixed reds including Grand Noir, Alicante, Negrette and Mataro. Field blends of this kind were the norm in nineteenth-century California, planted by Italian immigrants who saw no reason to separate varieties in the vineyard when they would be blended anyway, and they were picked and fermented together whatever each vine happened to be.

Almost all of them were grubbed up during and after Prohibition, so the survivors are genuinely irreplaceable: nobody would plant this mixture today, and nobody can recreate the vine age. Petite Sirah supplies colour and tannic backbone, Carignan acidity, and the odds and ends of Alicante and Negrette a savoury complexity that straight Zinfandel does not have on its own.