For a century Lodi’s fruit disappeared anonymously into other people’s bottles. Then the world rediscovered what its growers never forgot: gnarled, own-rooted Zinfandel vines, many well over a hundred years old, planted in deep sandy loam and cooled every evening by a breeze off the delta.

A century of vines, then a reckoning

The first vineyards went in during the 1850s, and by the 1880s and 1890s Zinfandel had become Lodi’s most widely planted grape. For generations the region was better known for Flame Tokay table grapes and for shipping trainloads of fruit east, including to home winemakers during Prohibition. Through most of the twentieth century Lodi grapes vanished into bulk and blended wines that carried other regions’ names. Wine writers called Lodi California’s missing link.

The reckoning came when growers began bottling under their own labels and the wine world tasted what those ancient Zinfandel blocks could do. Wine Enthusiast named Lodi its 2015 Wine Region of the Year. Lodi also built the LODI RULES program, California’s original third-party-certified sustainable winegrowing standard, now followed across the region and beyond.

Warm days, delta nights

Lodi sits in a classic Mediterranean climate where growing-season afternoons climb into the upper 90s. What makes it work is the Sacramento and San Joaquin River Delta just to the west. Every afternoon it funnels cool marine air off San Francisco Bay across the vineyards, dropping temperatures ten to twenty degrees before sunset. That nightly swing preserves acidity and aroma, which is why a warm inland region turns out reds that are fragrant and balanced rather than heavy.

The soils tell the rest of the story. On the Mokelumne River floor around the town of Lodi, deep sandy loam drains fast and, crucially, resists phylloxera, which is how so many vines here survive own-rooted and more than a century old. Climb east into the hills and the ground turns to ancient volcanic clay and cobbled, iron-rich benches better suited to Cabernet and Rhone varieties.

Zinfandel’s home, and a hundred grapes more

Zinfandel is the signature and the soul. Lodi is widely called the Zinfandel Capital of the World and grows a large share of all the Zinfandel in California, much of it from head-trained, dry-farmed old vines. The crown jewel is the Bechthold Vineyard, planted to Cinsaut in 1886 and reputed to be the oldest Cinsaut planting in the world, now sought out by winemakers far beyond Lodi.

But Lodi is no monoculture. Growers here farm more than 125 grape varieties, from Spanish Albarino, Tempranillo, Garnacha and Graciano to Rhone, German, Portuguese and Italian grapes. That mix, plus the value and the welcome, is a big part of why Lodi has become one of California’s most interesting places to drink.