By Virginie Boone

When winemaker Joel Peterson was inducted into the Culinary Institute of America’s Vintners Hall of Fame in 2011, he noted how wine was just beginning to rival beer as the American beverage.

“I don’t think anybody when I started came close to thinking that was a possibility, it was a small, esoteric little business, boy has that changed,” he said at the time, adding, “You take stock and gather breath and move forward. I plan to die with my boots on, hoping that won’t be for a very long time.”

Well, he’s not dead yet. And neither is Ravenswood, the winery Peterson founded in 1976 after working for Joseph Swan. When Ravenswood was sold to Constellation in 2001, for $148 million, it was one of the biggest wine acquisitions of all time – with Peterson the only no vote against the sale. Constellation then took it from 400,000 cases/year to 1 million.

Peterson’s footprints loomed large for a little longer. In 2009 the National Museum of American History included Ravenswood memorabilia like a “No Wimpy Wines” T-shirt (a diss on White Zin) and famous three-raven label logo, designed by Berkeley artist David Lance Goines, as well as a punch down tool in the Evolution of Food and Wine exhibit.

The raven logo was so popular for a time that it inspired a fair few tattoos. People with such a tattoo would be invited to taste free at the winery back in the day.

But alas, not all tales are fairy tales, and by 2019, Ravenswood was being sold again, this time to E&J Gallo, as part of a 30-plus wine and spirits brands and six-winery package deal valued at $1.7 billion.

While that deal was tied up in a back and forth with the FTC, both Ravenswood’s production facility and Sonoma-based tasting room were closed and contracts with many of its old-vine vineyards allowed to expire.

In between, Ravenswood started to slowly disappear.

“It’s disturbing to see a once-proud wine brand stuck in limbo,” Wine Spectator’s Tim Fish lamented in a 2020 story. “It’s not even clear whether the winery made wine in 2019, and harvest 2020 is fast approaching. That’s not something that is going unnoticed by California Zinfandel’s small but dedicated cadre of fans.”

Fast-forward five years and the good news is that Ravenswood is poised to return after a five-year hiatus, with Peterson onboard for the relaunch. And according to Wine Spectator, “E&J Gallo recently released the first new wines, beginning on a modest scale, with just 3,400 cases of four Sonoma County Zins from the 2023 vintage.”

The wines will include a Dry Creek Valley appellation wine, and single-vineyard offerings from MacMurray Ranch (Gallo owned), Monte Rosso (Gallo owned) and Teldeschi vineyards, the wines priced between $27 and $70.

It’s good to see Ravenswood embrace old vines again. During its heyday of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Peterson was one of the most important champions of old-vine vineyards, deliberately trying to highlight sites with plantings dating back to the late 1800s and early 1900s, when there wasn’t much interest in such a thing.

He once told me that the price when he started sniffing around was under $300/ton back then and the vines not particularly revered, with everyone moving more into Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay.

The white Zinfandel phenomenon helped keep some of the vines in the ground, but many others were pulled and replanted. But he and others, like Joe Swan and Paul Draper of Ridge started looking at the sites as both an important emblem of California history and as right for the environment in which they were grown.

Peterson and Swan found Old Hill Vineyard in Sonoma Valley, first planted in 1852 to mixed blacks, with a majority of Zinfandel. Bedrock Vineyard was another treasure trove of field-blended grapes, a 152-acre property originally planted in the 1850s and again in the 1880s by Senator George Hearst near Old Hill that Peterson bought with his son, Morgan, who makes wine under Bedrock Wine Co.

Barricia Vineyard was another important source, with Zinfandel dating back to 1892. Big River in Alexander Valley also figured into the original Ravenswood lineup, a 100% Zinfandel vineyard planted first in 1893. Russian River Valley’s Belloni Vineyard was another single-vineyard, as was Teldeschi Ranch, with vines planted in the 1880s.

Moon Mountain District’s Monte Rosso is in keeping with Ravenswood’s love of old vines, first planted in the 1886 to Zinfandel and Semillon at 1,300-feet elevation. MacMurray Ranch in the Russian River Valley was first established as a farmstead in the 1840s, became a beef ranch in the 1950s under actor Fred MacMurray, and transformed into a Pinot Noir growing site by Gallo in 1996.

It is welcome news to see a brand like Ravenswood return especially with its founder Joel Peterson on board, a true icon of Sonoma County wine.