In 2001, Racke sold the Haywood brand to international wine and spirits conglomerate Allied Domecq. Four years later, Haywood was sold to Beam Wine Estates, which in turn was purchased in 2007 by Constellation Brands, the worlds largest wine company.
And Constellation already had Ravenswood and the passionate Peterson as its spokesman and wine maker. At that moment, Haywood was able to reacquire the Haywood brand, along with inventory from the 2005-06 vintages.
Now that the 2006 Haywood wines are on the market, I tried the three key wines and found them all to be exemplary, each with moderate alcohols (ultra-high alcohol is a malady infecting many zins), each with excellent balance, and oriented toward gutsy meat dishes.
Now 71 and still as passionate a farmer as he was in the 1970s, Haywood is focusing on the quality of his wines the way he did in the 1980s.
Hell make only three zinfandels, all from his own property, and will sell unused fruit to an eager cadre of local wineries who know how prime are these vineyards.
Los Chamizal has 42 acres of terraced zinfandel in steeply sloped hillsides. There are nine distinct blocks with soils ranging from well-drained sandy loams to thin, fractured basalt soils at the highest elevations.
These gnarly vines are Haywoods prizes, and the wines evoke an earlier era of superb fruit and spice. The top wines are called Rocky Terrace and Morning Sun and sell for $35 each.
Wine of the Week: 2006 Haywood Zinfandel, Sonoma Valley, Los Chamizal Vineyard ($30) -- Superb violet/raspberry and pother berry aromas; black cherry with hints of pepper and in the mouth, and loads of flavor. And it improves with an hour in a decanter. Occasionally discounted to the mid-$20s.