South River Road just north of Clarksburg is like a path back to a slow, rural America. It's shady and quiet on a Thursday afternoon, and to the west, all you see is the occasional stately house and fields stretching, it seems, to the hills miles away.
We're just off this "highway," walking around the picturesque property of Wilson Vineyards, an oasis of wine country buildings, trees and lawn next to a broad stand of vineyards.
I'm out wine tasting with The Bee's Chris Macias. He's looking for tasting rooms to review. I'm looking for fun. And at the moment, we're both looking for just another human.
The best we can find is a calm, shorthaired dog who roams with us and barks a couple of times like he's trying to get us some attention. Even he can't help. It takes a couple of phone calls to learn that Wilson Vineyards doesn't have a public tasting room.
That's your Bee professional wine team: We get lost so you don't have to.
That's also a bit of life in the Clarksburg wine country. There are lots of vineyards, lots of wineries, lots of friendly dogs, and sometimes it feels like you're roaming through 1940.
The truth is, though, Clarksburg is barely 20 minutes from downtown Sacramento, and if you stood on South River Road near Wilson Vineyards and threw a rock across the Sacramento River, you'd break somebody's window in the Pocket area. If you had the arm for it.
Clarksburg is also a comer of a wine region and an area built on the deep roots that come from both the rich bottomland and from the families that have been farming there for generations.
The long farming lineage is everywhere. The Wilson family, for instance, began working its land in the early 20th century. They planted wine grapes in 1972 and sold them to some renowned wineries, including Beringer, Pine Ridge and their Clarksburg neighbors, Bogle. The first wine they made under their own label was a 1999 chenin blanc.
That, too, is the story of Clarksburg wine. Lots of growers began bottling their own juice only recently. Even more, Wilson Vineyards, like many growers in this nearly 60,000-acre wine-growing appellation, produces the two lesser-known grapes that are the stars of the region: chenin blanc and petite sirah.
"The best chenin blanc in California is made in Clarksburg," Sacramento grocer and wine merchant Darrell Corti told The Bee's Mike Dunne recently. "And it produces one of the best, if not the best, petite sirah."
Chenin blanc is a grape with a noble heritage in France. It can keep its good acid even when it's grown in warmer areas. But it was made a little sweet in America in the 1960s and '70s to be a white jug wine.
Usually, it takes some cold weather for many grapes to keep their acidity – which helps give a wine structure and balance – but the warmer wine-growing climates are where you get the big yields for mass production. With chenin blanc, there was both the big crop and big acid.
So Americans tend to think of chenin blanc as just a jug wine, but, Corti said, "I would prefer a really good chenin blanc to a ho-hum chardonnay." (For Corti's full conversation with Dunne, go to www.sacwineregion.com/129.)
Corti said the soils of Clarksburg are thick with minerals from centuries of foothill runoff landing in the Delta, and they produce a crisp, serious chenin blanc, often with a smell of honey.
Petite sirah, on the other hand, has been a longtime blending workhorse of the California wine industry because its color and body add heft to red wine blends.
It's a dark red, heavier even than cabernet sauvignon, and as its own varietal, it has a growing following for its denseness and for its taste of blackberry and pepper.
Both chenin blanc and petite sirah benefit not just from Clarksburg's rich soil but also from the cooling Delta night breezes, said Jody Bogle VanDePol of Bogle Vineyards.
Bogle is the mainstay winery of the Clarksburg region. Her grandfather, Warren Bogle, planted grapes there in 1968, and they produced their first bottle 10 years later. "Those were the first two varietals my grandfather planted," VanDePol said. "Somebody just handed them to him and said, 'Here, grow these.' "
Call The Bee's Rick Kushman, (916) 321-1187. Listen to him Thursdays at 8:40 a.m. on NewsTalk 1530 (KFBK) and 8:50 a.m. on Armstrong & Getty, Talk 650 KSTE.
