As a little teaser for the Winter Release which will be hitting your inboxes tomorrow morning please find attached the grower profile written by David Darlington on one of our favorite growers, Jim Dolinsek. Jim is a true custodian of a vineyard, that, by any economic rationalization, probably should't exist today. However, his love of the Italian heritage of the Russian River Valley vineyards and of the history growing deeply in the steep slopes of his ancient vineyard planted during the Taft administration makes him a fierce defender of the viticultural treasure he and his wife Kathleen possess. We hope you enjoy it! -Morgan





In 1996, Jim Dolinsek was riding his Nishiki ten-speed on Laguna Road, just northwest of Santa Rosa and southeast of the Russian River, when he noticed a new “For Sale” sign in front of a rundown house with an old vineyard. Dolinsek stopped, took a flyer from the kiosk, and, when he saw the price – $260,000 for 10.5 acres, planted to grapes and apples – he pulled out the sign and threw it into the grass beside the road.

Within an hour, he returned to the scene with his wife Kathleen. “I’d been looking for a place like this for twenty years,” Dolinsek says.


It says a lot about wine-country real estate that, despite the length of his search, Dolinsek was ideally positioned to perform it. A property manager and construction superintendent in southern Sonoma and northern Marin counties, his family goes back to the nineteenth century in the region around this same ranch. “When I called my father to tell him about it, he said he used to pick cherries near here in the Thirties,” Dolinsek says. “He knew the seller, Al Frati, who ran a horse sled picking hops on Slusser Road. This area was known for Italian families from Lucca – the Fratis, the Patellis, the Martinis, the Favas, the Paperas, the Fanucchis. My dad worked alongside all of them.”

The Frati family had nine siblings. The eldest and last onsite resident, Angelo, had recently died without a will or trust, so the court appointed his brother Alvin to execute the estate. “He tried to sell it to Gallo and K.J., but they didn’t want it because it was too small,” Dolinsek says.

If anything, it was too big for Dolinsek. “I’d always wanted two or three acres to grow fruit and have animals,” he says. “But the main thing was the old-vine zinfandel.”

For the previous ten years, Dolinsek and his friend Giuseppe Colombana had made wine themselves from the nearby Jovinetti Ranch. “We got the grapes for free in exchange for a couple of barrels of wine. It was old, field-blend zinfandel – the Italians shared all their budwood, so in bad years they could get deep color from petite sirah and alicante bouschet.”

The Frati vineyard, planted on the north side of a steep hill, contained all the above grapes plus teraldago, tempranillo, golden chasselas, black muscat, and mourvedre. For years the fruit had been sold to Joseph Swan, whose winery was just down the road. “I knew Swan wines were supposed to be something special,” Dolinsek says. “I’m not a wine expert; my wife and I drank Ravenswood and Topolos, and we got Williams-Selyem zin from my painter’s son – Nicolai Stetz, who owns Woodenhead now – but we didn’t know we should appreciate and savor it.” More important was the Dolinseks’ desire to “live the good life” – specifically, “drink Sonoma County zinfandel with homemade sausage and salami.”

It didn’t take long for Jim to win Al Frati over. While other potential buyers managed (despite Dolinsek’s efforts at sign excavation) to find out that the place was for sale, he says, “Alvin wanted us to have it because we wouldn’t tear the house down. Angelo was a packrat – the basement was full of garbage, and the well water was bad because the tank had dead rats in it. But I’d built a lot of homes, and I knew the roof was straight and the windows were plumb. Everybody else wanted to level it and make it all vineyards.”

According to probate law, the property still had to be offered at auction, with the proceeds divided equally among all the heirs. No bank would loan on the dilapidated house, so Dolinsek approached his boss about financing the sale. “He called my wife and asked if she wanted it too. She said, ‘This is Jim’s dream – if he wants it, I want it.’” When the day of the auction arrived and Dolinsek’s competitors realized that he was ready to go the distance, they dropped out and his dream came true.

In addition to plumb windows, the property came equipped with a 1953 John Deere crawler tractor, which had tracks (instead of wheels) for working hills. Dolinsek pulled out 450 apple trees and, studying viticulture with Rich Thomas at Santa Rosa Junior College, planted three acres of four zinfandel clones (as well as nine rows of syrah “because the nursery ran out of the zinfandel clone we wanted”). Since the property is situated in the so-called Golden Triangle, “Everybody tried to talk me into pinot noir. All the new growers said it was ‘correct’ for the Russian River Valley, but Kathleen asked, ‘Why should we plant pinot noir when we drink zinfandel? Do you want to make a lot of money, or do you want to do something special?’”

In that spirit, they kept the 4.5 acres of wizened, stumplike, dry-farmed, head-trained red vines, which, planted in 1910, produce only half a ton per acre. “They’re just running on Mother Nature,” Dolinsek says. “But half a bucket here and half a bucket there, and you’ve got a ton.”

By 2009, Dolinsek was selling his fruit to the Mara Wine Group. One day that spring, after he’d been working in the vineyard, a young, muscular, sandy-haired man approached the house. “I thought, ‘What does this guy want? He’s probably looking for work’,” Dolinsek remembers. “He asked about the grapes, and I told him they were under contract for another two years. He asked what they were, and I told him they were mixed. He said, ‘Mind if I look around?’ He said his winery was called Bedrock; he didn’t even have a card, but his friend Chris did. Morgan [Twain-Peterson] wrote his number on the back.”

As fate would have it, within a couple of months the Mara group asked to be excused from its contract. “We had a good feeling about Morgan,” Dolinsek says in retrospect. “He had enough chutzpah to come talk to us, and he seemed like he had a lot of passion. So we gave him first dibs.” That year Bedrock made an “heirloom” wine from the old vineyard – rich and concentrated but, true to form for Russian River field blends, beautifully balanced by the cool climate, varietal diversity, and deep-rooted vines.

The following year, 2010, was the vineyard’s centennial anniversary, for which Dolinsek planned a special commemorative bottling. “We’d been waiting for it,” he says. “Then we got three days of 108-degree heat. The vines got cooked – there was not a single cluster. It still makes me cry right now.”

2011 was another potential disaster – a cool one this time. “If you pick grapes too green in the Russian River Valley, they’ll taste green,” Dolinsek says. “Our fruit was looking nice, but in October a big front was coming in from Alaska. I didn’t think the fruit was going to last, so I told Morgan, ‘It’s up to you, but I think it will be fine if you pick it now.’ He picked it all in one day, and later said it was the best wine he made in 2011. Other people lost half their fruit.”
“Almost everybody around here is a pinot guy here except me,” Dolinsek says. “Swan, Kistler, Guy Davis Family, Donelan syrah from Walker Vine Hill. Kathleen and I have some nice pinots now; as you become part of a community, you can’t be just one way – we need to appreciate all the varietals in our area. In my opinion, the Russian River is number one for pinot noir and Anderson Valley is number two. For zinfandel, Russian River is number one and Dry Creek is number two. The zinfandel here is different from Dry Creek – they have more pepper and spice; we have more earthy, mushroomy, black-raspberry-framboise flavors.” Napa? “Cabernet and car parts. Not zinfandel.”

Dolinsek is now a member of the Vine Hill chapter of Druids Hall, which raises money for scholarships for local kids. When he joined, its president was Alvin Frati, who died in 2007. “All the people I met when we first got this place have passed away,” Jim says.

In an interesting sense, Dolinsek is thus carrying on an Italian tradition that his own family was never part of. “We’re maintaining a heritage that was left to us,” he agrees. “We don’t do it for the money. It’s about the land – we grow grapes so that somebody can make a good glass of old-vine Russian River zinfandel. You can’t recreate a hundred years of struggling. These vines have weathered Prohibition, deer, skunks, gophers… it’s amazing that a vine can produce wine after a hundred years. And it’s great when a young guy like Morgan can make a wonderful wine from it.”

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