Prime territory

Lloyd Walker is about to show me around his vineyard. We're in the house his grandfather built in 1913. The parlor is homey and cool, its extensive woodwork a study in intricate craftsmanship.

As recently as last year, Walker and his wife, Claudia, continued to run livestock on the property, which is 280 acres of wildland 2,100 feet up the Sierra and eight miles southeast of Placerville.

Sheep had roamed the land since the 1940s, but the Walkers wanted to be free to roam more themselves, and they also were frustrated by the number of lambs they'd been losing to coyotes and dogs.

"They tied us down, and they were just driving us nuts," Lloyd Walker says of the sheep.

Since his grandparents got the land in 1907, it's been farmed. The products, however, have changed with the times, from dairy cows to walnuts to sheep to grapes. The first zinfandel went in with the first walnut trees in 1939, the vines intermixed with the saplings. Walker figures his grandfather did it that way to assure himself of some income from the grapes while the slower-growing trees matured. He also squeezed some of the grapes into wine, but only for home consumption, aging it in barrels in the cellar under the house.

Those first vines, however, were torn out in the 1940s as the walnuts came on line. Few people in those days saw any potential for wine grapes in the foothills.

Lloyd Walker grew up on the ranch, left for college, went to work as a mechanical engineer with Aerojet in Rancho Cordova, where he spent 35 years, and in 1962 moved onto the spread with Claudia and proceeded to raise four daughters.

In 1968, just as commercial wine-grape growing was starting to revive in the foothills, they planted a small test plot of 15 varieties in part of the hay pasture.

The green grape chenin blanc prospered in the experimental vineyard, and the market looked encouraging, so in 1972 they planted 10 acres to the variety.

A hands-on approach

From the start, the Walkers never entertained any grand vision of converting the surrounding rolling terrain into a substantial vineyard. They wanted just enough vines for the two of them and their daughters to tend themselves. They expanded slowly, in 5-acre blocks. It's a philosophy they continue to embrace. They bring in outside laborers only during the hectic fall harvest.

"We planted just what we could handle," Lloyd Walker says. "We wanted to do all the work, with our children."

No irrigation water was pumped to the ranch in those early days, so Walker drove a 1929 Model A Ford truck with a 500-gallon tank on the back to the edge of the vineyard and watered each vine by hand.

Today, they continue to work the vines themselves, rising early to spray in the spring, prune in the winter. For this, they are rewarded with sunrises over Pyramid Peak to the east, views of the moon drifting over Mount Diablo to the west.

In 1974, aware that zinfandel had a history in the foothills and encouraged by the popular revival the wine was seeing at that time, they planted their first 5 acres to the variety.

Nowadays, the vineyard stands at 21 acres. All the chenin blanc is gone, grafted to other varieties. Of the 21 acres, 10 are planted to zinfandel, 5 to chardonnay, 4 to merlot and about 2 to petite sirah.

The vines stand alone

Let's go see that vineyard. We're out of the house, past the barn and up to the top of the ridge crowned by the Walkers' vineyard. This is my first visit to the vineyard, though I've been appreciating and writing of zinfandels made with Walker grapes for at least the past decade.

Greg Boeger, founder of Boeger Winery on Apple Hill, has had a handshake agreement with the Walkers to buy their zinfandel since 1980. A couple of other wineries also buy the grapes, but Boeger's Walker Vineyard Zinfandel is the one largely responsible for raising the vineyard's profile. The wine is a perennial medal winner, and the current release, the 2004, scored 90 points from influential wine critic Robert Parker Jr.

On the wide arc of zinfandel styles, which range from the light and pink to the heavy and inky, Boeger Winery's Walker Vineyard Zinfandel falls just to the right of center. It's generally a dark and brilliant red, with fresh fruit flavors evocative of blackberries and raspberries. A dash of pepper often livens up the fruit, the texture is supple, the spine wiry, the finish zesty.

The vineyard that yields this wine is high, wrinkled and wide open to the sun. The terrain is so pitched and rocky that outcroppings and cairns of stones pulled from the plot during planting stand here and there like ducks on a Sierra trail. So do owl boxes, which the couple has erected on tall poles to lure owls to help control gophers. Prune trees stand sentinel at the end of rows to provide shelter for a kind of wasp that likes to feast on the eggs of the dreaded leaf hopper, an insect whose appetite and excrement both damage vines.

The Walkers maintain their vines in a style that is virtually anachronistic. Each vine stands solitary, its canes growing as wild and long as the tresses of Medusa, unsupported by stakes and wires, in contrast to the conventional practice in most vineyards. "That's how my grandfather did it," says Lloyd Walker, who also notes that the lay of the land and its rock outcroppings make trellising problematic.

The local irrigation district has punched several neutron probes into the soil to help monitor its moisture content, helping the Walkers determine when to irrigate, which they rarely do.

As Walker strolls about the vineyard, he has his own ways to tell how the vines are doing, ranging from how much vegetation they are carrying to the way the leaves turn under the advancing sun.

"It looks fairly close to a normal year," he says. "The vines don't look stressed." He points to a few grapes that have sustained sunburn but sees nothing to suggest that the vineyard won't yield its usual 35 tons of zinfandel. The harvest, he predicts, should get under way about mid-September.

At the ideal elevation

Why a particular site does so well by a specific grape variety is something of a mystery. Several factors contribute to the eventual outcome -- the nature of the soil, the intensity of the sunshine, the annual rainfall, the elevation, the exposure, the wind. Some influences are more or less fixed, some change daily.

Walker has his own thoughts on why zinfandel performs so well in his vineyard. The soils are deep and well drained, the vines are laid out to catch plenty of sun, and the currents of air above the north fork of the Cosumnes River, which the vineyard overlooks, help cool the fruit at night in the summer, prevent frost in the spring and fall. "We've only used the sprinklers once in 30 years to prevent frost," Walker says.

The vineyard's 2,100-foot elevation is key, he suspects, a zone above the torrid Central Valley, below the colder temperatures of the high Sierra -- ideal for zinfandel to show its best.

"I don't really know what it is," he concedes.

Greg Boeger concurs that the elevation of the vineyard contributes most significantly to the distinctiveness of Walker Vineyard. Between 2,100 feet and 2,400 feet -- "zinfandel's elevation sweet spot" -- the grape just does exceptionally well, Boeger says.

Well-drained soils of granitic origin, the flow of air through the vines, the particular clones of zinfandel planted on the site, Walker's meticulous tracking of the vineyard's water needs and his willingness to pick even small sections of the vineyard when grapes are at optimum ripeness also contribute to the wine's quality, Boeger adds.

The vineyard is divided roughly into three blocks, from high on the ridge to far down the slope. Greg Boeger sees no appreciable difference in the nature or quality of the fruit from each section, though grapes higher up tend to ripen two to three weeks earlier than the others.

Attempts to attribute characteristics of a wine to the site where its grapes are grown are always tricky, not just for the variation in weather each year but the role the winemaker plays in working with the fruit. The yeast for fermentation, the components of the blend and the type of oak used for aging are all subject to tinkering.

Grace over power

At Boeger Winery, Greg Boeger was responsible for transforming the Walker grapes into wine until 2000, when he turned over that heady task to his son Justin. They've taken different routes up the slope, the elder Boeger not much interfering with the fruit, the younger more willing to experiment with different kinds of oak and to boost the final wine's proportion of petite sirah.

Nonetheless, both winemakers ended their trek at the same spot, retaining the threads that distinguish Walker Vineyard zinfandels from vintage to vintage -- brightness of fruit, an easy accessibility, a dash of white pepper, a citric snap to the finish -- even though Justin Boeger's interpretation of the wine has been bigger and bolder in recent vintages.

With the 2004, however, he lightened up on the alcohol and oak, and the resulting wine is closer in freshness and agility to the Walker Vineyard zinfandels of the mid-1990s than to releases early this decade.

Justin Boeger says he intentionally is cutting back on the alcohol, seeking grace in the wine more than the power that is typical of many zinfandels.

Is he more apt to emulate his father's way with the Walker Vineyard zinfandel than he was early on?

"That's hard to say. We're known for the Walker Vineyard zinfandel, so some things have been carried over. I'm not particularly bringing in what he did, but I'm not avoiding it, either. We analyze it on a year-to-year basis, and each year make a different decision. We're really focused on making it a big but structured wine," Justin Boeger says.

Passing along tradition

Meanwhile, back at the farmhouse, the Walkers talk of reducing their time in the vineyard so they can travel, relax and fly-fish more. They don't see themselves expanding the vineyard, and they're turning over management of the grape growing to their daughter and son-in-law, Ann and Tim Johnson.

Ann Johnson is especially involved in working the vineyard, and this harvest for the first time she will be driving the big rig that delivers gondolas of grapes to Boeger Winery.

Next spring, they'll add 2 acres of zinfandel, not so much to enlarge the vineyard as to compensate for aging vines whose output of fruit is declining.

Beyond that, she sees herself and her husband picking up where her parents are leaving off, doing much of the work of vineyardists themselves.

"I'd like to keep it in the family another 100 years," she says.

About the writer:

• Reach The Bee's Mike Dunne at (915) 321-1143 or mdunne@sacbee.com.