I first met Tom Dillian when I was an
intern working for Cary Gott (Joel Gott’s father) at the Montevina winery in
1979. We have known each other for
almost fifty years, and I have been making wine from his fruit for more than
half that time. We call the wine we produce
from Tom’s grapes Nostro Vino or ‘Our Wine’.
It is part of our acknowledgement that so much of what you enjoy in a
bottle of our wine is the result of the care, attention to detail, and
expertise of our grower partners.
Sometimes I refer to the Nostro Vino
Zinfandel from Tom Dillian’s ranch on Steiner Road as the “caboose”. Like the last car on the train, the nostro
Vino Zinfandel is usually the last Zinfandel into the winery. Including the ‘Rocket Fuel’ and Primitivo, we
offer seven different Zinfandels, and I must go back fifteen to find a vintage where
we harvested another Zinfandel after the grapes from Nostro Vino. There is a good reason for this. Tom Dillian’s Nostro Vino Vineyard, while only
three miles away, might as well be on another planet. The Nostro Vino Vineyard
has a northern exposure and sits another four hundred feet higher in
elevation. The amount of time it takes
for this vineyard to warm in the spring puts it two to three weeks behind the Zinfandel
grown in the Cooper, Massoni, Peroni or Esola vineyards. In the spring when the
vines at Nostro Vino are just starting to grow the shoots are almost a foot
long at the other locations. This means
that the Nostro Vino grapes ripen later in the season, often when the nights
have cooled a degree or two. As a
result, the grapes hang on to their acidity and more sugar accumulates before
they are fully ripened. Given this additional ‘hang time’ the pigments
in the skins have a chance to deepen just that wee bit more than elsewhere. Therefore, the wines produced from
the Nostro Vino Vineyard are bigger, with more color and depth of flavor and
more tannin than Zinfandels produced from other vineyards here in the
Shenandoah Valley.
