Frog's Leap Estate Napa Zinfandel 2022

John Williams founded Frog's Leap in 1981 and has been quietly running the farm the way everybody in Napa used to before the valley got rich. Dry-farmed. Organic-certified. No irrigation, no synthetic anything, and a sense of humor about the whole thing that every pretentious Napa château lost somewhere in the eighties. The Zinfandel is the one I come back to. Estate fruit from Rutherford, bright raspberry and bramble, white pepper, a finish that is genuinely dry. Most California Zinfandel tastes like somebody spilled cherry cola into a glass. This does not. This tastes like what Zinfandel used to taste like when Paul Draper was making Ridge out of Sonoma and everybody was paying attention to the fruit instead of the label. I keep two bottles in my cellar at home year-round. Pulled one out for a backyard steak dinner in Tarrytown two weekends ago. A neighbor, who drinks mostly Cabernet, tried it and asked what it was. When I told him Zin, he did not believe me. That is the Frog's Leap trick. A dry-farmed organic Zin from one of the most expensive zip codes in the wine world, priced like it was made by somebody who cares more about the dirt than the magazine review. Because it was.