Edoardo Seghesio left his family’s vineyards in Piedmont, Italy, in 1886 and landed in Sonoma County with nothing but the same skill he’d grown up with. He found work at the Italian Swiss Colony, one of the region’s earliest wine operations, and did well enough there to marry his boss’s niece, Angela. Together they bought 56 acres of land with one goal: plant their own vineyard and make their own wine. In 1895, Edoardo put Zinfandel vines into what the family still calls the Home Ranch, in Alexander Valley, and some of those original vines are still alive and still being harvested today, a hundred and thirty years later.
What followed reads like the plot of a family saga rather than a wine label’s backstory. The Seghesios survived Prohibition by selling grapes rather than wine, made it through the Great Depression, and rebuilt after a 1996 fire scorched the winery itself. Through all of it, the family kept farming the same old vines, refusing to pull them out even as much of Sonoma replanted its Zinfandel acreage with more fashionable grapes. Seghesio Family Vineyards still maintains the oldest documented blocks of Sangiovese in North America on its Chianti Station vineyard, heirloom vines that don’t exist anywhere else in the world, alongside Zinfandel blocks that regularly run 70 years old or older.
The wine worth actually buying is the Seghesio Sonoma County Zinfandel, the winery’s flagship bottling and the one built to be an everyday pour rather than a special-occasion splurge. It’s blended from more than 150 individual vineyard lots across Sonoma County, mostly Zinfandel with small amounts of Petite Sirah, Sangiovese, and a handful of other reds mixed in, and it comes out full-bodied and spicy, black raspberry and cherry pie up front, cedar and dried herb and a little black pepper trailing behind. It’s built for a burger, a plate of ribs, or a pizza with too many toppings, and it holds its ground against all three.
Wine Spectator named it the 2024 Wine Value of the Year, an award the magazine only hands out when a wine manages to be genuinely excellent, priced fairly, and actually easy to find all at once. The winning vintage scored 93 points and was made in a run of 112,500 cases, which is a real number, not a boutique release a handful of people will ever see on a shelf. The winemaker’s team picked much of that fruit overnight, between 1 a.m. and 9 a.m., to get ahead of a 115-degree heat wave that hit Alexander Valley during harvest, hand-picking in the dark to bring the grapes in cool enough to preserve the wine’s freshness.
All of that effort still lands in a bottle that runs about $17 to $26 depending on where it’s bought, with Costco and Total Wine both regularly stocking it closer to the bottom of that range. It’s the rare wine that wins a major industry award and still shows up at a warehouse club a few weeks later, priced like nothing happened.
