December look of own-rooted Carignan, planted in the sandy soils of the east side of Lodi’s Mokelumne River AVA in 1909.
2023 will go down as the year when old vines finally got their due. No longer for just the outward beauty of these plants, their astonishing longevity or the special character of their resulting wines, but also for their significance in respect, as the recently established (June 2023) Old Vine Registry puts it, to the current “planetary crisis.”
It is the very adaptability of old vines to decades or even centuries of extreme weather, pest and disease pressures that carry the “secrets of survival,” according to Old Vine Registry, tantamount to the entire international wine community. “Big, gnarly vines,” they write, “are significant reservoirs of biomass and carbon… they play vital roles in local hydrological cycles… their old, deep-and-wide root networks are inextricably bound up with and connected to the mycorrhizal networks that sustain, feed and protect our soils.”
In addition, “old vineyards are also often full of clonal diversity and rare varieties… the genes of old vines can be studied, and old-vine material can be propagated for more resilient young vines.”
Hollowed trunk of Mokelumne River-Lodi Zinfandel over 100 years old.
Lodi, of course, has been a haven of more acreage of old vines than anywhere else in the America. A lot of it is happenstance. Whereas other regions committed primarily to commercially important grapes such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay and Pinot noir during the modern era (more
