Dover Canyon Winery

2005 Dover Canyon Carmenere, Colbert Vineyard

If we told you that you could taste an American production of a once extinct red Bordeaux grape, and that   the vineyard consistently produces wine under 13% alcohol, and that the wine was made in Paso Robles, and that the wine is rich and delicious . . . you’d say . . .

Well, you might ask what else we are planting in the vineyard besides vines.

But it’s true. I think we’ve found something very special in the Colbert Vineyard carmenere, and we are pleased to offer only 50 cases of the 2005 Dover Canyon Carmenere from Colbert Vineyard. This special wine is from the warmer, rolling slopes of San Miguel, in the northern part of the Paso Robles wine appellation.

"Carmenere loves heat," says Denny Colbert. "I don’t think it would do well even on the fabled soils of West Paso Robles," he said. "It’s just too windy there, and too cool at night."

The Colbert Vineyard carmenere offers the deep cherry and chocolate flavors that people love in red wine, a sophisticated streak of tobacco across the mid-palate, and a natural alcohol of only 12.8% percent. Three vintages in a row, 2004 through 2006, Colbert Vineyard has produced deeply pigmented and flavor-packed wines with alcohol under 13%.

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.