Nebbiolo picker in Anaya Vineyards’ Potrero Vineyard, Clements Hills-Lodi AVA.
It is time to catch up with Anaya Vineyards, one of Lodi wine country’s most interesting stories; especially since the latest release of their estate grown Nebbiolo⏤a grape native to Northern Italy‘s Piemonte region⏤which only adds to Lodi’s growing reputation for bold, alternative, contemporary style, terroir focused wines.
If you’ve been a Lodi wine lover for more than a decade, you might recall that the original label for wines crafted by Anaya Vineyards owner/winemaker Gerardo Espinosa was Viñedos Aurora, established in 2009 and named after the Anaya family’s first vineyard (planted in 1998) in the Clements Hills-Lodi Viticultural Area.
Accordingly, Viñedos Aurora established its reputation on the basis of deep, dark and tannin-laden vintages of Petite Sirah and Cabernet Sauvignon very much representative of the shallow, gravelly clay hillside slopes unique to Clements Hills. It is a terroir, in fact, so different from the deep, ultrafine, fluffy sandy loam and flat-as-a-pancake landscape typifying the original farmlands planted around the City of Lodi, that it served as the original impetus for the proposal to divide the Lodi appellation into seven different sub-appellations, back in 2005.
Gerardo Espinosa in 2012, planting Potrero Vineyard in Lodi’s Clements Hills AVA.
Shallow clay soils produce red wines that are so different from red wines grown in super sandy soils, they may as well be made from different grapes. If anything, the original musclebound reds of Viñedos Aurora were a fulfillment of all
