By Alex Biale
Monte Rosso® is one of the few wines we make that I have a hard time being objective about.
I’ll try anyway.
If you’ve read previous editions of The Black List, you already know my bias. I gravitate toward sites that make you work for them. Sites with weather. Sites with elevation. Sites where the road eventually stops and you keep going on foot. Monte Rosso® is exactly that kind of place. And, fairly asked, it isn’t even ours. We don’t own it. It isn’t even in our county.
So I want to spend a little time on why a Napa winery makes a Sonoma wine, why we’ve been doing it for thirty years, and why I’d put this bottle in front of just about anyone who’s honestly curious about what California Zinfandel can be.
The Vineyard
Monte Rosso® sits at roughly 1,100 feet on the Sonoma side of the Mayacamas, the spine of mountains that separates Sonoma and Napa. From the top, on a clear day, you can see Sonoma Valley fall away beneath you, and on the right kind of morning you can pick out the silhouette of San Francisco and the Bay beyond it. You feel removed and connected at the same time.
The soils are reddish, volcanic, packed with rock and iron. They give the place its name. The vines are old in a way that’s hard to fully process when you’re walking among them. Huge, twisting, majestic, head-trained Zinfandel planted in the 1880s and still producing. Local lore says the roots run as deep as forty feet. Whether or not that number is exact, the wine tastes like it could be true.
It’s worth pausing on what those vines actually represent. Some unnamed crew of immigrant laborers, more than a hundred and forty years ago, climbed a remote California mountainside with hand tools and decided that this was where good wine could be grown. That’s not a story you can manufacture. It’s older than my family’s American chapter, and it’s older than most of what people in Napa now call “old.”
After Prohibition, Louis M. Martini bought the site and began bottling it simply as “California Mountain” Zinfandel. For decades it was the quiet engine behind some of the most compelling and age-worthy wines on the Martini label. Over time, the Martini family opened the gates a little and shared this rare fruit with a small group of Zinfandel winemakers they respected. We were fortunate to make that list in 1995, and we’ve been making this wine ever since. Today the vineyard’s owned by E. & J. Gallo and stewarded with real care by Vineyard Manager Juan Alonso, who’s earned a reputation in California viticulture for the level of attention he brings to historic sites like this one.
Why a Napa winery makes a Sonoma wine
Some places are too important to be decided by a county line.
The Mayacamas range is a single piece of geography. Sonoma’s on one side and Napa’s on the other. Monte Rosso® is one of the most historic Zinfandel sites in America. If you’re going to argue that California Zinfandel deserves a place in the conversation alongside the great red wines of the world, you have to make wine from places like this one.
That’s the short answer. The longer answer is that Monte Rosso® teaches us things about Zinfandel that we can’t learn anywhere else. The combination of elevation, volcanic soil, and vines that have been quietly working their way deeper into a mountain for almost a century and a half produces a wine with structure and acidity in places where most Zin softens. It sharpens our standard.
The 2023 vintage
If you’ve been paying attention to California, you know how the last several years have gone. Drought. Heat. The kind of weather that asks farmers to make hard decisions every week. Then 2023 happened, and a lot of that anxiety was answered in a single season.
The rains arrived just after we finished the 2022 harvest and kept coming through spring. Groundwater recharged. Temperatures stayed cool. Budbreak waited until April. Flowering came in the middle of May. The whole growing season unfolded at the kind of unhurried pace that experienced farmers quietly love, because nothing has to be rushed and everything has time to mature in step. Flavor, sugar, acid, and tannin all arrived at the same place at the same time.
For Monte Rosso®, that mattered. Picking began across our earlier Napa sites in September. Moderate heat at the very start of October moved the back half of the harvest along, and we worked through the rest of the month. The fruit that came off Monte Rosso® in 2023 was concentrated without being heavy, ripe without being roasted, and structured in a way you only get from a cool year on a high-elevation site.
The Wine
There’s a note this site gives that I’ve only ever encountered up there. A particular Moon Mountain chaparral. Sun-warmed mountain brush with a faint medicinal lift. It’s the first thing you find on the nose, underneath blackberry, anise, and something darker and thicker that lands somewhere near pomegranate molasses.
On the palate, Monte Rosso’s® signature is acidity. It runs straight through the wine and gives it a lift you don’t expect from a Zin of this density. Around that line you find cedar, black cherry, dried herbs, and a touch of nutmeg. The tannins are finely woven, present but quiet, and they extend the wine into a finish that’s long without being heavy.
This is mountain Zinfandel that holds its posture. It’s not trying to be the loudest wine in the room. It’s trying to be the most precise.
We made 244 cases.
A word on the reviews
The wine’s been received well. 96 points from James Suckling. 95 from Vinous. 95 from Owen Bargreen. 92 from Wine Spectator. 91+ from Wine Advocate. 16.5+ from Jancis Robinson. I’m genuinely grateful for those notes, because they help carry sites like this one to a wider audience, which Monte Rosso® deserves.
But the reason this bottle’s on The Black List isn’t the score. It’s the place.
What we’re protecting
A lot of what I’ve written in The Black List comes back to a phrase we keep returning to: Napa As It Was. Monte Rosso® is across the ridge from Napa, but it’s part of the same story. It’s heritage California. It’s the kind of vineyard that was planted long before anyone built a brand around drinking the wine. It’s a national treasure, and I don’t use that phrase lightly.
We’re one of a small handful of wineries fortunate enough to have been entrusted with this fruit for thirty years. That’s not a relationship we take for granted. The vines were here long before any of us, and if we do our job well, they’ll be here long after.
Long live Monte Rosso®.
