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$14.00
POKERVILLE ZINFANDEL 2008
The name for this wine was inspired by the original name for our nearby town Plymouth. Back in the gold rush days in the middle of the 1800’s, it was a rip roaring mining town named Pokerville. Not intended to impress wine snobs, Pokerville Zinfandel is made to feature the variety’s cherry-berry taste and to be just plain fun to drink. It would have been appreciated by those grubby old miners. The very reasonable price adds to the fun.
Pokerville Zin is the product of our eight year old vineyards as of this vintage, with a little wine added from more senior vineyards as available to add more depth of taste. It is crushed within minutes after hand picking within sight of the winery. We ferment the hard way punching the mash by shoulder and grunt for about a week, then press off to neutral barrels. We want to feature the fruit, not oak staves. We bottle in about six to nine months after to capture the wines sweet freshness before it wanes. Sniff and swirl if you like, but most folks just knock it down in hearty swallows.
TECHNICAL DATA
Alcohol 14.8%
Total Acidity 6.0 g/l
PH 3.7
Residual sugar 0.3%
Harvested 9/3 to 9/17/2007
The first Pokerville Zinfandel was a salvage effort from some bad decisions and bad luck with the 1990 vintage. We used what good wine we could spare from other lots in an attempt to improve a volatile alcoholic failure. We were not completely successful. When we had done all we could, we compounded the problem by bottling a lot of this bad wine. We were not going to fop-off a less than good wine on our customers without a warning, so we put it in a completely different package and label and decided to offer it for $6 retail. We chose to name it Pokerville after the old gold rush name for our nearby town, later renamed Plymouth after the shooting stopped and Joaquin Murietta had been captured and separated from his head.
Chagrined to have such a poor product within our premises, for a few months it was eyes straight ahead in denial of the mound of Pokerville cases. Then came the annual visit of D.O.P.S, our DC-Maryland distributor. We tasted through all the current and upcoming wines and prepared to adjourn to one of Karly’s famous lunches. As we were leaving, Jeff Dieringer spotted the stack and noted they had not been shown this wine, like we were holding something back. I explained I did not wish to lower the regard for our winery of one of our favorite wholesalers, the wine is not good. Now even more curious he insisted on tasting the wine. “This isn’t so bad, what is the price?” Six dollars retail.
“I think I can sell it, send me a pallet”. Two weeks later a phone call; “how much of that stuff do you have, I want it all”. The trucks rolled. Two thousand cases later the sales pace slackened as stacks of Pokerville had run through the national capitol area. I thought buyers had caught-on to the strangeness of the wine and the game was over. No, featured wine deals have a limited life and things will go slower from now on as retailers must come up with something newer to reestablish excitement, even with good wines. We were happy but we still owned a bunch of the wine. I never found out.
Rather quickly on the heels of this miracle, came an early morning phone call from my one-man distributor in Minneapolis calling with congratulations, “on what”. “Being the Best Buy in the Wine Spectator with front section billing and a full face label”. “Which wine?” I thought they had discovered one of our premium products. “Pokerville Zinfandel and what is it?” Same month Robert Parker the influential “Wine Advocate” rates it a Super Buy. It is absolutely astonishing what this kind or national press can do for business. End of the 1990 Pokerville, and end of the story. Jeff confessed he had dropped off a bottle for Parker to taste, but what about the Wine Spectator? I never would have risked the reputation of my winery with that wine.
When the dizziness ended and brain function returned, I realized that we would be really stupid not to recognize what had just happened and not to profit from the experience. Obviously our wine taste preferences are not aligned with the rest of the world. Fine, let everybody like whatever pleases them. Pokerville Zinfandel has been in our lineup ever since as an honest simple wine priced well below its value. It is a way of making friends for the winery who will eventually become curious about our other wines, and it is OK with us if our customers are happy just to stay with this affordable quaffer.
We have been growing Orange
We have been growing Orange Muscat on the estate since the eighties. Why Dad started making it in an eiswein style is a mystery even to Buck. Since the French grape – German style combination obviously works, he tries not to ssat think about it too much. The reasons why we continue this procedure are simple; it makes good wine and it’s really fun. We pick toefl the grapes when the green grapes have consistent brown specks. This is determined scientifically: when large squadrons of magpies are flying to the southeastern sector of the property, we pick. usmle Since we could wait until the next millennium and never have our Muscat freeze, we store them at a commercial freezer until November, load them into the press whole and frozen, and press. We start the fermentation immediately, and stop it in March (it’s wonderlic thick stuff). Fine, filter & bottle.