There are an overwhelming number of wine producers out there. That leads to countless bottles on shelves all over the world. Some of those labels have a neat little story on them about the winery, the grapes, or something else. Too often, those stories are marketing spin, created to make a wine more appealing. It doesn’t mean anything is particularly wrong with that wine, but if the wine I’m drinking has a story attached, I want it to be real, not from the land of make-believe. Sonoma County’s Dry Creek Valley is fortunate to have quite a few real stories. It’s an area dotted with family wineries, some fairly new, others generations old. One of my favorite stories and wineries for a variety of reasons is Puccioni Vineyards.
The Puccioni Wine story starts way back when Glenn Proctor’s great-grandfather Angelo Puccioni plantedzinfandel more than 100 years ago. In fact, zinfandel has been grown on the site without interruption since 1904. The original iteration of Puccioni as a winery was in 1919. That version lasted through 1935, even surviving Prohibition with a government license. Selling grapes to home winemakers during that period helped as well. This is a practice they continued for many years after Prohibition ended. Head over to The Daily Meal to read the rest.