2020 Bedrock Wine Company 'The Bedrock Heritage' Sonoma Valley 750 ml

Before James Naismith put up his first basketball hoop; before the Wright brothers took flight at Kitty Hawk; and before Coca-Cola slapped a label on their first bottle, the vines at the Bedrock Vineyard were already rooted in their Sonoma Valley soil. After 132 years of yielding grapes for powerful, densely fruited wines, Bedrock is “among the most pedigreed vineyard sites anywhere in the world,” according to Antonio Galloni.

Bedrock is the flagship vineyard on which winemaker and Master of Wine Morgan Twain-Peterson—the son of Ravenswood founder Joel Peterson and the author of multiple bottles that earned 100-point scores from Wine Advocate—has built his Bedrock Wine Company into a “world-class performer,” in the words of Robert Parker.

Initially planted in 1854 by Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and "Fightin’ Joe" Hooker, Bedrock’s thick and gnarled vines (some as high as six feet tall) rise from Red Hill clay loam soils, eking out tiny, thick-skinned, powerful grapes like only ancient vines can.

At its location in the “Banana Belt” of the southern Sonoma Valley, Bedrock experiences less wind and fog than its northern Sonoma counterparts, allowing its grapes to achieve juicy ripeness. The Bedrock Heritage is a field blend built on Zinfandel, Carignan, and Mataro (Mourvèdre), accented with 27 other varieties interplanted on the property. Twain-Peterson co-fermented them, then aged the wine in a combination of large-format puncheons, demi-muids, and 228-liter barrels of French and Austrian oak.

More than a century in the making, the Bedrock Heritage isn’t just history—it’s a wholly satisfying wine of complexity and perfect balance.