Turley turned old-vine Zinfandel from a punchline into a category worth taking seriously. Larry Turley was an emergency-room doctor who started the winery in 1993, and instead of planting fashionable Cabernet he went looking for California's oldest Zinfandel vineyards, many of them neglected because the vines were low-yielding and hard to work. The bet was that the old ground made better wine, and that each site deserved its own bottle.
That bet now fills the range. Femente lists around seventy Turley wines, and fifty of them are Zinfandel, with Petite Sirah accounting for most of the rest. The wines are drawn from more than fifty vineyards across the state rather than blended into one label, some with vines planted in the late 1800s, each named on the bottle so the vineyard is the subject and the grape is almost assumed.
California
The vineyard work runs through Tegan Passalacqua, the winemaker and vineyard manager who has spent years finding and reviving these old plantings, farming them organically and dry, without irrigation, so the vines root deep and yields stay honest. His side project of documenting California's surviving old vines has become one of the reasons a Zinfandel planted before Prohibition is now something people seek out rather than pull up.
For a buyer, the phrase to watch is old vine, and Turley is a large part of why it now means something on a Zinfandel label. It points to fruit from a site that has survived a century of reasons to be replanted, and to a wine that tastes of that place rather than of the grape's old reputation for sweetness and heat.
