One October night, two harvests ago, I pulled off a country road in Santa Rosa to observe what I thought would be a typical grape pick. The first surprise was arriving at someone’s home. The second was that, instead of long rows of vines, there was just a small patch of land planted intermittently with what looked like large bushes.
A handful of volunteers, donning headlamps and bent over the bushes at uncomfortable angles, rummaged around until they finally located and plucked the treasure within: chartreuse-colored clusters of grapes.
The mangled bushes were actually vines, planted in 1902 at the Betty Ann Vineyard. The group’s ringleader, the now-68-year-old winemaker Greg La Follette, co-founder of Marchelle Wines, believes they’re the oldest French Colombard vines in North America. La Follette, who helped the vineyard’s owners resuscitate the vines when they purchased the property, is helping to make French Colombard cool again. Regarded for its crisp acidity, it was the most widely planted white grape in California until the 1990s, when Chardonnay overtook it. There’s still a lot of it planted in California, but it’s almost all relegated to distillation or blended into cheap bulk wine…