A Visit With Benito Dusi

Every year we buy zinfandel fruit from Benito Dusi. Ridge purchases the lion’s share of this 80-year-old vineyard, as they have for about 25 years, and we purchase the remainder. As clearly as I can recall, Ridge was the first extra-appellate winery to actually put "Paso Robles" as an appellation on their label. A daring move for a winery with a fine reputation, to align itself with an area commonly associated with the subterranean Estrella River, which conveniently disappears under its sandy riverbed every summer.

Imagine it is 1959.  Driving down Highway 101 to the beach towns of Morro Bay and Cambria, Dusi Vineyard was a charming stop on the way to a clamming weekend with the wife and kids. Women wearing loose rayon sundresses, silk stockings and open-toed heels accompanied their husbands on the short walk into the Dusi tasting room—a small, separate cottage between the home and vineyard. A six-foot tasting bar hosts the southern side of the cottage. Magazines lauding the four San Luis Obispo County wineries are still carefully fanned out on the corner of the tasting bar. I pick up the 1959 Sunset guide to California wineries. A two page black-and-white spread with brief descriptions of each of the four wineries also includes photographs of sleepy Cambria, a rickety one-boat dock with a view of the Rock at Morro Bay, and a family clamming on a local beach.

In a daring leap of faith, central coast zinfandel grower Sylvester Dusi and his son Benito raised the price of their wine by ten cents a case. Dusi zinfandel went from $5.90 a case to $6.00. They held their price at $6.00 a case for fifteen years—from 1959 to 1974.

In 1959 Benito Dusi was a young man in his mid-twenties. Although now in his seventies, it’s not hard to see Beni as the young man he was and always will be. He has a way of flashing oblique glances at me under his lashes, as though he knows a good joke but is too shy to tell it. He’s not tall, but he’s muscular in a wiry kind of way, standing upright with his shoulders unconsciously back and open, even when the room is cold. It is easy to see him as a young, bashful, and incredibly smart farmer.

I drove to Beni’s vineyard on a balmy January afternoon to deliver our check for the previous vintage, but also to present him with copies of the accolades the 2003 vintage had received. "Really?" he asked. "Is this published in Manhattan Beach? I have a niece there," he added. After pawing through the Wine Spectator, some newspapers, and the San Francisco Chronicle, Beni gave me a tour of the original family tasting room and winery. "Here," he said, gesturing in front of meticulously dusted shelves containing several decades’ worth of antique glass and defunct labels, "is where we stacked our wine cases. You could buy a case, or you could buy two one-gallon jugs for the same price." The gallon jugs on Beni’s shelf include elaborately blown bottles with glass leaves and clusters gracing the shoulders, and bold rings around the neck.

Next we visited the old winery barn. The large wooden barriques are gone, but Beni gestures to each corner, remembering the size and smell of each of his father’s 3,000 gallon wooden tanks. Workbenches hold trays of meticulously sorted nuts, bolts and washers, and spraycans of paint and lubricant are lined up in rows like soldiers reporting for action. I stared in mild awe at a wall-sized stack of antique picking lugs, each wooden box assembled with exactly 40 iron nails.

"In 1965," said Beni, "a friend and I delivered 1,016 boxes of grapes to Paul Masson in Soledad. That was when they first opened. The boxes weighed 7 pounds each, and each box had 50 pounds of grapes. We arrived late in the afternoon and the workers took one look at us and scattered!"

"Beni, what did you do?" I asked, distracted by the fact that he remembered the exact number of boxes, the weight, and the year.

"We worked. Hard," he chuckled. "We lifted all those boxes of grapes off the truck and stacked them," he said. "Then we moved them into the winery and restacked them."

Benito Dusi’s tenacity and attention to detail is evident in the quality of his family’s heritage vineyard. The Benito Dusi old vine zinfandel is always one of my favorite releases—it has a consistent profile of wild berry, briar, and mixed peppercorn that sets it apart from other zinfandels.