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Buck Hill Vineyard
Sonoma County
I met Randy Apel in 2007 when he was looking for a new buyer for some of his excellent Zinfandel grapes. hillside vineyard on the eastern side of Santa Rosa, not very far from the Kick Ranch, planted the old style with head pruned vines. Head pruning is just fabulous for Zinfandel when done right, its worth it just for the exquisite shape of these old vines! Randy offered me fruit from the steepest terraces in the vineyard and it’s a scary place to take even a four wheeler. I wasn’t surprised to hear that Randy has rolled a tractor on this hillside. Steep hillsides generally lead to well drained soils and this in turn, leads to smaller berries and more concentration. For Zinfandel this is very important, as Zinfandel tends to want to grow big bunches with big berries. For good reason its been widely used to make blush wines.
Zinfandel is also a notorious irregular ripening variety and we have to work diligently in the field dropping unripe clusters to make the fruit more uniform. For this reason, with the exception of the younger Rossi Vineyard fruit, I just can’t seem to sample correctly when I take only berries from the vineyard for analysis. I tried to do this when I started making Zinfandel in 1996 and after all sorts of weird lab numbers I settled on just going out and tasting fruit and looking at the amount of raisining. Zinfandel has a habit of forming raisins amongst the good fruit and these can lead to very high sugar levels in the juice if you wait too long to pick. Despite all these problems, Randy has the uncanny ability to tell me what the sugars will be when I pick. He has an incredible old refractometer that is inscribed “made in occupied Japan” and between his samples and this instrument, it just doesn’t miss. I suppose the lesson is to get to know your vineyard. It reminds me of my father’s ability to tell how many tons of grapes he has in the field. Dad seems to do it every year, off only a ton or so out of 200! I wonder if I have to wait until my seventies to have this ability.
Buck Hill fruit (so named from Randy’s nickname and the many deer that are in the woods around the vineyard) gives me a wine with good acids, soft tannins and lots of red fruit flavors.
