A unique red blend from truly historic vines — ready for your corkscrew.

Intensely fruity, with head-spinning boysenberry and brambly black cherry and blueberry undertones. The fruit is so intense, and the sweet baking spices so aromatic that after one whiff and your first sip, you’ll have the sensation of biting into the best mixed-berry pie of your life—one dusted with crushed cacao nibs. All that ripe, sweet, lovely fruit is balanced by savory white pepper and new Leather, framed by old-vine structured tannins, which are robust but never drying or overpowering because of the intensity of the wine’s juicy, ripe fruit. This is the wine to savor alongside herb-roasted lamb, braised meats, mushroom risotto, or meat-heavy pizzas.

Today we have a wine from a relatively unknown wine region in California, Lot 919 2021 Contra Costa Petite Sirah with some really cool history. By the mid-1800s one of the most important farming communities in the entire United States—one still harboring a host of pre-prohibition vineyards planted in riverfront sand along a major Pacific Ocean inland delta—was Contra Costa County in the San Francisco East Bay. Today, residential buildings are more prevalent, many in the place of these historic heritage vineyards—but some have been saved.

Of those vineyards that have been spared by the bulldozer, some are the original vines planted by Italian immigrants rooted in beach sand dunes along the San Joaquin River Delta. Others are ‘younger’ vines, around 40-60 years old, planted by their descendants—‘young’ for Contra Costa but ‘old’ by California standards. And it is there, among the dunes, in a land rich with agriculture ghost stories of the past, that we sourced this fruit-forward Petite Sirah for Lot 919. Vines averaging 40 years of age are dry-farmed, producing small-berry clusters that are rich in flavor. A splash of Alicante Bouschet adds bright fruit qualities, while the Petite Sirah grapes bring muscle, robust tannins, and structure. Fire up the pizza oven, and send us an invite!

This is a Petite Sirah from a historic region that screams value, and at only $14 it’ll be the perfect addition to stock up on for these cold winter months.