2019 mural depicting Miwok tribal life, established over a span of 5,000 years, during the early 1800s. Amy Hosa and Linda Yamane, San Mateo County Historical Association.
We never tire of telling the story of the Lodi appellation. Why should we? It is a history as rich and compelling as the ultra-fine sandy loam soils—the deepest and most consistent, by far, in the entire state of California, for that matter the entire U.S.—surrounding the City of Lodi.
It is also a story of an appellation whose history goes as far back as any wine region, bar none, in California. Think about it: California became a state in 1850, at a time when the so-called forty-niners were pouring into the Sierra Nevada foothills from around the world to seek their fortune in gold.
The vast majority of fortune hunters did not strike it rich, so they did the next best thing—fanning out into the flatter regions stretching from Sierra Nevada to the San Francisco Bay to stake their claims as farmers or ranchers. Many of them, of course, were of European lineage, and Europeans drink wine, which requires grapes.
This recent photo of a valley oak grove, privately conserved by Jessie’s Grove Winery, is almost exactly how the Lodi Viticultural Area looked like before the arrival of people of European descent in the early 1800s; a landscape dominated by grasslands and deeper rooted species of oak between teeming rivers and marshes.
Hence, by 1852 the first vineyards were being planted everywhere
