2017 Steele Zinfandel Pacini Vineyard Mendocino County 750 ml

Jed Steele’s Zinfandel from the historic Pacini Vineyard is one of the great underrated red wines of California. Grown on a 102-year-old dry-farmed vineyard, bursting with loads of dark fruit, herbs, and a panoply of complex aromas, the 2017 vintage is built on a backbone of vibrant acidity and it’s hitting a perfect stride right now. It’s exactly what you want and crave from a Zinfandel grown on a historic California site.

In the early 1980s, Steele, armed with a UC Davis Master’s degree and a Stony Hill stint on his resume, went to Lake County to join an upstart winery called Kendall-Jackson. He worked there for nine years until KJ’s burgeoning corporate structure started grating on him, so he struck out on his own—and Lake County was already exactly where he wanted to be.

Zinfandel, however, took him back to Mendocino County, where he’d worked before taking the KJ job. He began working with grapes from the stunning Pacini Vineyard, which was purchased by the late Larry Pacini in 1965. It’s rumored that the Zinfandel vines on the site were a century old back then, but the Historic Vineyard Society pegs the site off of Mill Creek Road to have been planted right at the start of the 20th century.

Take one sip of this 2017 and you’ll see why Steele bought the site when Larry Pacini passed in the 1990s, and why this was a go-to Steele bottling for decades. Profound, exhilarating, and absolutely delicious, it’s exactly what California Zin should be.