How important are California’s old historic vineyards? Important enough that the state Assembly voted Monday on a resolution affirming their value “to the agricultural and social heritage of the state.”
Lawmakers approved the resolution, HR 9, on a voice vote, with no opposition. Proposed by Assemblyman Tom Daly, D-Anaheim, the move has solely symbolic value, but it is a significant step for vineyardists in the state who are hoping to keep antique vines in the ground.
“California wine is a wonderful success story that is still proceeding,” said Daly, who introduced the resolution earlier this year. “And many of the backstories are still being discovered and told. It’s as rich as anything in our state in terms of tradition.”
Given the state’s fondness for frequent replanting, it can be harder than it might appear to preserve old vineyards. In 2010, several prominent vintners, including Ridge Vineyards and Turley Wine Cellars, created the nonprofit Historic Vineyard Society, in part to create a registry of more than 200 sites throughout California that date back as far as the 1880s, or earlier. Their hope is to find incentives to keep these old vines in the ground, perhaps a tax break, but the legislature’s vote is a first official step.
Although California’s wine industry tends to focus on the shiny and new, it still produces some top wines from vineyards that are often more than 60 years old. A broader effort has been under way for several years to keep these older vines in the ground — both because of wine quality and because they provide a rare link to the state’s agricultural past.
Among the more famous antique vineyards are the Monte Rosso site above Sonoma Valley, a historic source for Zinfandel and Cabernet; the Hayne vineyard on some of St. Helena’s best ground; and the J.J. Cohn ranch, whose vines are thought to be the oldest remaining Cabernet planting in Napa Valley.
And why would a legislator from a city with an agricultural history leaning more to citrus be taken by wine grapes? For one, says Daly, a former mayor of Anaheim, its early settlers planted vineyards in the area. (They, like most of the South Coast’s old vineyards, have vanished, although some vines remain near Cucamonga.) But he and his legislative director David Miller, have been fascinated by the state’s antique vines for several years. A Chronicle story last year about the society’s work was “a memory jog,” Miller says, prompting them to discuss drafting a resolution.
Of course, this being Sacramento, there was some fine-tuning of language: While a draft called such vineyards “irreplaceable,” the final version considers them “treasured.”
Daly’s effort proved to be less controversial than at least one previous attempt at the state capitol to honor wine graopes: the effort to designate Zinfandel as the state grape, which then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed in 2006.
For his part, the assemblyman sees the resolution mostly as a chance to discover a lesson or two in the state’s long wine history: among other things, that properly tended vines can be a remarkably sustainable crop.
“Imagine the farmers who planted these vines back in the day, looking down the road [to see] that we in the year 2013 would be learning from some of their methods,” he said. “It’s exhilarating when things tie together across generations like this.”