Long-Lived Appeal: Do Old-Vine Wines Really Taste Better?

Something that Gregory Jones, a climatologist and winemaker who lives in Oregon, said recently about old-vine wines really stuck with me. “When you walk through a vineyard,” he said, “the old vines talk to you, the young vines don’t.”

At first I thought: that’s a romantic way to spin a marketing message. But then I remembered a day about 20 years ago when century-old grapevines in Sonoma County, California, talked to me.

The owner-manager of Old Hill Ranch in the Sonoma Valley, Will Bucklin, was walking me through what his family calls their Ancient Block of mixed field-blend grapevines dating from 1885. It was in March, and the ground was freshly tilled between interplanted, head-trained, dry-farmed, untrellised vines ranging from alicante bouschet and carignane to petite sirah and zinfandel, as well as two dozen other grape varieties.

Bud burst was just beginning. Seeing the annual renewal happening as tiny leaves – at first looking reddish and then light green – emerged from their winter dormancy prompted a sweet moment of reflection. The sun shone brightly, the air smelled fresh and sap flowed from the roots of the vines, up through the trunks and arms and slowly dripped from recent pruning cuts.

Yet it wasn’t just another beautiful spring day – it happened to be the vernal equinox, possibly March 20 that year. It’s the day the sun returns to the northern hemisphere after a long winter, marking the beginning of spring. I felt that the vines were telling me to take it all in, to feel the movement of the planet, to sense the connection of soil, plant, sun and human being.

Afterward, I tasted the Old Hill wines made from this block of old vines two years before, and they were spectacular, deep, complex and well-balanced.

This little epiphany seems relevant after spending a lot of time recently thinking about the importance of old vines, their appeal to wine drinkers and the threats to their existence. I have made wine twice from quite old vines, most recently in 2024, and written about them since the 1980s.

Listening to the earnest discussions and academic presentations that occurred during the Old Vine Conference sessions in Napa and Santa Rosa last fall brought a lot of issues around old vines to the front of my mind.

How should growers take care of old vines? Are they economically feasible considering the usual low yields? How old does a vine need to be to qualify as old? Why are they important? Are they important? How can a winery effectively promote wines made from them?

Other questions are even more interesting to us wine drinkers. Are old-vine wines inherently better than others? Can you really taste the difference?

Is that the reason so many people want to save them? Or is it mostly a sentimental attachment, the kind that prompts citizens to demand that highway planners reroute a street around a beloved oak tree?

Let’s consider some of those questions. Regarding what constitutes old, the International Organization of Vine & Wine uses a rather liberal age of 35 years as the minimum, but other organizations use 40, 50 or more.

An accepted fact is that old vines tend to have very deep roots after all those years. Deep roots help with drought resistance and help the vines stay calm and cool in hot weather so they grow and ripen their grapes consistently from year to year.

Old vines are said to make wines that taste more distinctive, more complex, more concentrated and sometimes more lively in terms of fruit acidity. Old vines are often less gangly and vigorous in their shoot growth than young ones. That same composure, or balance, seems to come out in the wines they make.

To be honest, I can’t necessarily pick out an old-vine wine when tasting blind. But when I know the wine comes from a historic vineyard, I get more out of it intellectually and emotionally. To me it becomes more enjoyable than others, worth savoring and commenting on during a meal.

California, where I live, has plenty of good examples. I singled out one of them in a recent Wine Crush video, describing the Robert Biale Vineyards Zinfandel Napa Valley Oak Knoll Aldo’s Vineyard 2022 as bringing finesse, subtlety, polish and depth that you wouldn’t get from younger vines. This was made from vines planted in 1937.

Another reason that a historic vineyard tends to produce excellent wine is that its continued existence after many decades shows that the owners of the property were happy with what the vineyard produced. When other nearby vineyards were ripped up and removed, the owner preserved this one because it was economically sustainable. Wineries always bought the grapes, or the vigneron used them to make and sell their own wine because the grapes were inherently high in quality and consistency.

Winemakers and growers in California commonly acknowledge that historic vineyards are usually the ones growing in the best spots – where microclimate, soil, drainage, choice of grape varieties and exposure have proven over time to be very favorable. They are old because they deserve to be.

The vineyard where I bought grapes for my 2024 house wine demonstrates this. The vines in this plot were planted before the federal ban on alcohol in the United States came into effect in 1919.

READ MORE BEYOND ZINFANDEL: A NEW ENERGY DRIVES LODI WINES

I decided to get those grapes after tasting and rating a wine from this plot with Jim Rickards, the winemaker who owns the property: the J. Rickards Zinfandel Sonoma County Alexander Valley Old Vine 1908 Brignole Reserve 2021. It feels deep and structured, yet pretty, floral and packed with fresh berry flavors.

If old-vine wines do taste better, what’s the technical reason? Research done in Spain and summarized at the Old Vine Conference by Jose Ignacio Garcia Lopez, director and technical secretary of the Campo de Borja region, gives scientific evidence that old garnacha vines confer advantages in terms of aging ability and flavor development when compared with younger ones.

A study done with apparently painstaking care over four years yielded data showing that old garnacha vines favor more black fruit over red fruit aromas, which is generally a good trait leading to rich flavors, as well as greater potential for aging in terms of phenolics. They also provide a more vivid expression of their sites, or terroir, than younger vines. In Lopez’s words, “The old vine flavors were more intense, diverse and consistent than the young vine flavors.”

This is just one study, but it makes more concrete some of the claims that winemakers have made for centuries. One Italian wine-grower studying old vines closely is Domenico Veronese, the owner of Villa Bogdano 1880 in Veneto’s Lison appellation. In addition to growing international varieties, his estate preserves native grapevines including refosco dal peduncolo rosso and 42 acres of tocai friulano, including 100 vines that date to the early 20^th century.

Veronese wrote to me that his interest in old vines is centered on three themes: Their ability to produce a superior-quality wine, related to being able to withstand an extreme climate; their superior resistance to diseases; and their contribution to sustainability.

The bit about resistance to diseases is what really caught my attention. It was a topic that I hadn’t heard much about. Veronese has observed his old vines fighting off trunk diseases and what they call yellowing diseases in Europe. So he partnered with a plant pathologist, Ruggero Osler from the University of Milan, to study whether what he sees is really what’s happening: the spontaneous remission of disease symptoms in plants previously symptomatic and the absence or low incidence of some diseases in old vineyards that evolved through massal selection. (Massal selection is the technique of replanting or expanding a vineyard with cuttings from existing vines that appear healthiest and possess the best winemaking qualities.)

If the recovered plants exhibit similar behavior as healthy plants, might they have taken on that resistance long term? And might the resistance be transferred to new offspring vines using scion wood from the old vines?

Veronese’s team is establishing a mother field of vines propagated from Villa Bogdano’s old vines to test this theory over time. If proved to be true, it wouldn’t be a surprise to people who have read up on the field of epigenetics in biology.

Epigenetics explains that gene expression can change during a lifetime. So the inherent traits of a living thing don’t change solely due to mutations, as I was taught in school. The life experience of a parent plant or animal can cause adaptations that are sometimes passed to the offspring.

This idea is being discussed in international viticulture circles. “I don’t see why it wouldn’t be epigenetics,” said David Gates, Ridge Vineyards’ senior vice president of vineyard operations and a veteran of working with old vines.

In a phone call he said that the ability of a vine to pass on favorable traits through select cuttings that are then propagated is the whole basis of massal selection.

So could old vines be potential game changers in protecting vines from disease and promoting the economic stability of grape growing? Old-vine growers and winemakers face the reality that they can’t afford to preserve old vines if they’re not ultimately profitable.

For growers in a place like Sonoma County, that means selling their old vine grapes at a price per ton as high as  pinot noir or cabernet sauvignon, yet the old-vine grapes are often zinfandel, carignane, petite sirah or barbera – varieties that usually command only half the price of pinot noir.

The economic pressure to rip out old vines and plant something new with twice the yield and twice the price is fierce. That’s why they are being uprooted and replaced with newer vines or other crops in regions around the world.

There’s a simple-sounding solution – convince consumers and the wine trade that old-vines wines are special and worth a premium price. Plenty of people are attempting that, but they have to clear a number of hurdles.

One hurdle is educating the public that “old vine” is, in fact, a positive term. I mean, would you want to buy an old-tree peach? Or an old-goat yogurt? “Old” is often a negative.

For that reason, some wineries label their old-vine wines as “historic vineyard” or “heritage blend” and so on. Sonoma-based winemaker Morgan Twain Peterson is a cofounder of the Historic Vineyard Society, which now counts 1,800 acres of 50-year and older properties. “People just getting into wine roll their eyes at terms like clones and soil, but everyone can relate to history,” he said.

The unpopularity of zinfandel is also a discouraging factor, apparently. Many, probably most, old vines in California are zinfandel. And with zinfandel wine sales stuck in the doldrums, trying to get more people interested in old-vine zinfandel is a challenge.

It’s one reason that wineries like Ridge Vineyards emphasize single vineyard names on the labels of their old-vine wines, rather than “old” and “zinfandel.” Which brings up the seemingly contrary possibility that old-vine wines might sell better if wineries don’t mention it.

Nevertheless, if a consumer knows the wine in their glass comes from old vines or a historic vineyard, they are probably going to like it more. It quite possibly will be a higher-quality wine anyway, and the knowledge that it is special will add a little more sparkle to the experience.

Wineries should put the information on the label one way or the other: old, historic or vielle vigne, and do it as part of the winery name, not just in the marketing text.

We as wine drinkers will enjoy the wines. Growers and winemakers will enjoy the profits.

A lot of people would be happy to walk among old vines and hear them talk, as those who grow, make, serve and write about wine get to do. When that’s not possible, however, anyone can still hear the vines’ voices – through the wine in their glasses. Check out the tasting notes for a selection of some of the top old-vines we've rated over the years below.

– Jim Gordon, Editor-at-Large

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated by the JamesSuckling.com tasting team. You can sort the wines below by country, vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.