I believe that the best way to decide how good a wine is, is to taste it without knowing what it is. To taste it blind.

Because that’s the main point of drinking wine: the flavor impressions you get purely from the wine. But often other factors affect your enjoyment,too. As a critic, I was trained to ignore these factors (and honest blind tasting ensures that) but as somebody who simply loves to smell, taste and swallow wine, I’ve got to acknowledge the other factors that come with the wine.

Sometimes this is knowing exactly where the wine came from, walking down the vine rows with the owner and getting a feel for the wine’s terroir.

Recently I visited a vineyard in Sonoma Valley that has more than enough sense of place to enhance the enjoyment of its super-quality wines. Old Hill Vineyard has supplied grapes to Ravenswood for a vineyard-designated Zinfandel since 1984. And since 2000 Old Hill’s owner, the Bucklin family, has been bottling some of the crop itself. Both the Ravenswood version ($60) and the Bucklin version ($34) are delicious wines that combine full body with great balance. When I tasted them on different occasions I slightly preferred the Bucklin for its intricate complexity of fruit flavors, but I tasted (well, drank) it non-blind so I admit to the prejudice of place.

Old Hill is just off scenic Highway 12 in Glen Ellen. It’s not on a hill, but is named for its original owner, William McPherson Hill, and it’s definitely old. “Old vine” is a fairly common term for Zinfandel, but the definition is quite loose. Old Hill was planted in 1852. Will Bucklin walked me through the vineyard this spring on the vernal equinox as the buds were just bursting, and I got the same time-travel sensation I get when visiting the old-growth sequoia groves in the Sierra.

The twisted, gnarled, sculptural, timeless vines here are among the oldest food-producing plants on the planet. They don’t yield many bunches compared to new vines, but they have deep roots, sturdy trunks and can produce excellent wine grapes year in and year out.

Most fascinating is that Old Hill is one of the few surviving field-blend plantings in the state. Its founder was a county agriculture official, a state senator, and presumably used the best farming knowledge of his day when he planted Zinfandel vines intermixed with 25 other grape varieties. Zin, originally from Croatia, accounts for the majority of the vines, but a considerable percentage of French/Spanish varieties including Grenache, Mourvedre, Carignane and Syrah and others grow alongside the Zinfandel vines.

Will Bucklin lives on the Old Hill property. His mother and stepfather bought it in 1981. He farms the antique vineyard with care, and conducted a two-year campaign to identify the variety of each vine on the property. Most were planted in the 1880s after the root pest phylloxera damaged the original vineyard.

Vines don’t come with name tags, so the process was slow and painstaking, involving experts including Andy Walker from the UC Davis faculty and experienced local vine grafter Salvador Pricado, who identified the vines by the shape of the leaves, the texture of the bark, shape of the trunks, size and configuration of the berries and other factors.

The wine is called a field blend because the mixed varieties are harvested together, crushed together and fermented together, rather than being processed separately into wines and then blended together in proportions determined in tasting trials.

So, what you plant is what you get. This is the single most important factor in the quality of Old Hill wines, said Bucklin. One variety adds color, one adds body (alcohol), one adds acid and each adds its own aromas and flavors, for a wine that’s more than the sum of its parts.

When you throw in the knowledge that a bottle of wine from Old Hill conveys living California history, then you’re enjoying more than a sensory wine experience.

I’d like to hear about your experiences in which a wine’s place of origin added substantially to its enjoyment.

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