![]() Today, Terri is sole owner, and she tends the vines herself. They trimmed the yield to less than two tons per acre, and Scott began bottling wine made from its grapes for Renwood, using the name “Grandpere Vineyard.” photo by: Michelle Harvey Scott Harvey of Santino (later Renwood) winery was among these customers, and when the Downings retired in 1984, Scott and his wife Terri bought the place. The Grandpere vineyard was then owned by John and Virginia Downing, and they still operated in the old mode: selling to jobbers, home winemakers, and a few wineries that made white Zinfandel. Other wineries such as Ridge, Monteviña, Joseph Swan, and Sutter Home were finding that if they returned to the pre-Prohibition vineyards, pruned aggressively to limit yields, and practiced low-intervention winemaking, quality went through the roof. Darrell Corti put Amador on the map then with his bottling of 1968 Deaver vineyard old-vine Zinfandel. Thus the Grandpere Vineyard thrived, and grape acreage across Amador actually increased during Prohibition.īig changes came with the Zinfandel boom of the 1970s. (One of these jobbers was Amador native Ernest Gallo.) Zinfandel was a favored grape because it withstood the journey. In Amador County, merchants known as jobbers arrived in trucks stacked with empty wooden boxes, and bought the grapes for shipping by rail to customers in many parts of the country. The vineyard dodged the bullet of Prohibition because the law allowed a loophole for home winemaking. Grandpere also weathered several ups and downs in the California grape-growing economy, as local wineries and Italian immigrant home winemakers reliably purchased the produce. When the phylloxera root louse attacked California vineyards in the 1880s, the remoteness of the Shenandoah Valley spared many of its vineyards. Eric Costa’s research on the history of Amador County winegrowing uncovered an 1870 agricultural census showing 250 gallons of Zinfandel in the possession of George Rouff. At the time that the Grandpere Vineyard was established, Zinfandel cultivation was a rising trend, as growers preferred its wine to that of the Mission grapes that the Franciscan friars had brought. Some of these cuttings arrived with Gold Rush settlers to northern California nurseries that likely supplied the Upton family. An 1869 land deed shows grapevines planted on the 10-acre site, located in the Shenandoah Valley about five miles northeast of the town of Plymouth.įollowing its origin in Croatia, Zinfandel came to New England in the 1820s, where hobbyists cultivated it in hothouses as a table grape. Upton, the original settlers, or their daughter Martha Upton and her spouse George Rouff, who were married in May 1866. The identity of the original planters is a bit hazy, though genealogical research has narrowed it down to the Upton family: either to John D. Its history is closely linked with that of California wine, and with United States wine consumption in general. ![]() At 143 years of age, the Original Grandpere Vineyard in the Sierra Foothills is the oldest documented Zinfandel vineyard in California, and it still produces wines of high quality. ![]()
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