A single vineyard wine from a passion project. Sandlands is a personal project headed by Tegan Passalacqua, the longtime head winemaker of Turley Wine Cellars. The focus of the project is to showcase the older varieties that used to dominate Californian viticulture before the the arrival of the Bordelais and Burgundian grapes. These wines are made with head trained, dry farmed and ungrafted vines, as was the norm over a century ago. This is where the "sand" in Sandlands comes in as the infamous grape pest phylloxera cannot tolerate sandy soils, so most of these vineyards are in soils of decomposed granite (i.e. sand).
This particular bottle is all fruit from the Kirschenmann vineyard, which is owned by Passalacqua himself. The vineyard was planted in 1915, in what is now the Mokelumne River AVA. The vineyard is planted mostly to Zinfandel with small amounts of Mondeuse, Cinsault, and Carignane mixed in.
