Our West Coast editor Linda Murphy (currently judging this year's Wines of Chile Awards in Santiago) draws our attention to a fine vintage for California’s signature grape, with tasting notes for no fewer than 60 examples.
Joel Peterson, the founding and ongoing winemaker at Ravenswood Winery in Sonoma, has been around the vineyard block so many times – 33 vintages – and produced Zinfandel from nearly every California region that grows it, that I’m confident in his recollection of the 2006 Zinfandel vintage in Northern California:
‘As the result of a wet winter and a dark and stormy spring, the...