Three Wine Co.

“If you think about it,” he’s saying, “this is a way better place to grow grapes than Napa and Sonoma. It’s probably one of the most unique grape growing areas, and the varieties that were chosen were the perfect ones.

“The problem,” he adds, “is that it’s very small. There’s only like 6,000 acres of sand dunes here.” Of which only a small and shrinking fraction still support grapes. “And the thought of losing it,” Matt trails off, “…is not good.”

Trying to describe the gnarled sources of Matt Cline’s Contra Costa blends is a fool’s errand, but it helps to think on three time scales. Geologically, these head-trained vines poke through sand piled 35 to 40 feet deep atop clay hardpan—dunes deposited over eons by winds that shuttle Pacific air along the San Joaquin River, which spills into a tule marsh half a mile north as the crow flies. This exceptionally poor, beach-like soil intensifies red-berry aromatics. In agricultural terms, the vineyards are living museums. Planted in the 1880s to Zinfandel, Carignane, Mataro (Mourvedre), Petite Sirah and a few other varieties, these plots retain own-rooted pre-phylloxera vines that have survived for upwards of 130 years in soils too sandy for the phylloxera louse to gain a foothold. Most of them are dry-farmed—a rarity in a state that never escapes drought for long. Old-timers around here talk about pulling up vines to find roots that went down 30 feet.

The third time scale is where things get tricky. Because in real-estate terms, Cline is squeezing phenomenal old-vine reds out of profoundly endangered land. 

Back when his grandfather bought a land-grant parcel nearby, the early settlers—called Sandlappers—were regarded with awe for making a go of it in a place where it was said that “only jackrabbits and coyotes can thrive.” When Matt started helping his brother make wine here in the early 1980s, the US Census still counted just 3,000 souls in Oakley. But since then the population has mushroomed to 45,000. The BART commuter rail was extended to neighboring Antioch in 2018. Amazon opened a distribution hub. And everybody needs a place to live. 

So the heritage vineyards that Matt Cline has been working pretty much all his adult life—since 2006 under the aegis of Three Wine Company, which he founded with his wife Erin—have become sandy islands hemmed ever tighter by cookie-cutter subdivisions, light industry, mobile home parks, public schools, drive-through coffee joints, gas stations, and all manner of 21st-century American sprawl.

The vineyards reach considerably further back in time. “The varieties we grow were the dominant ones prior to Prohibition,” Matt says. The vigor of Zinfandel and Carignane appealed to early Portuguese and Italian settlers, whose penchant for blending remains evident in the small blocks of Alicante Bouschet they set down at the ends of the dominant grape rows. Cline shares their outlook. “To me every grape is a blending grape,” he says. “To make a wine out of one varietal—well—is rare. Everything benefits from blending. But the marketers have trained everybody to obsess over certain varietals, because that helps sales. It dumbs it down, makes it easy—and we don’t have that 2,000-year history that Europeans have.”  

Age has combined with the local micro-climate to turn these vines into something special. Carignane, for example, “is a very vigorous variety,” Matt observes, “but it has to be tortured” to make great wine. “And the best examples in the world are here, and Priorat.” As temperatures climb in Contra Costa and hot air rises from the Central Valley, westerly winds sweep through the vines. “The plants can’t regulate their water loss, so the vines shut down during the day,” Matt explains. “That’s one of the many beauties of this area—growing the varieties we grow. What it means is that sugar doesn’t build, and the acids don’t disappear. So we get low yields that ripen slowly, and end up with great acidity—with no intervention in the winery.”

That acidity, which imparts a spring-loaded energy to Matt’s powerfully concentrated reds, is what distinguishes Three Wine Company. Oakley’s sandy vineyards are an open secret among serious Zinfandel vintners. Ridge, Turley, and Bonny Doon are just a few of the top producers that source fruit from nearby. But over four decades Matt has developed an exquisite feel for subtle variations not only between these vineyards but within them—this block, on a mound eight feet higher than surrounding ones, has to be picked a little later; the slightly heavier soil over there favors early harvests for the lower-alcohol Japanese market, but walk a few rows west for “full-throttle” Carignane as lush as any on earth. That knowledge also supports compelling experiments like the Faux Pas “Chillable” Red, which mixes rosé and red wine lots into a lighter expression of Oakley’s ancient vines.

 In recent years, Matt has shifted more and more energy to defending these old vines from all the people who have other designs for them—from real-estate speculators to the state of California itself. Having endured the spectacle of bulldozers rolling over 19th-century plantings to make way for housing developments, he has spent the current century on high alert. He owns some acreage but purchases the lion’s share of his fruit. So he’s suffered losses—but wins as well. As California moved to restore the Dutch Slough salt marsh in the early 2000s, Cline waged a years-long campaign to protect a 14-acre Carignane vineyard established on an upland dune mound by a Portuguese subsistence farmer in the late 1800s.

“Because this vineyard is non-irrigated and farmed sustainably, it is a model that will show that we can coexist within our environment and can show the public and future generations of farmers how we need to live and grow,” he argued in a memorandum to the California Natural Resources Agency. “This ancient vineyard needs to remain intact as a living museum for our world renowned California wine industry now, and to inspire our wine makers and viticulturists in the future.”

It took something on the order of a decade, but Matt’s advocacy paid off in an agreement to preserve the vineyard—which provides grapes for half-a-dozen of Three’s blends. 

“Environmentalists don’t look kindly at farmers,” he says matter-of-factly, standing in the sun. “Just look what we’ve done: strip it down, mechanize it, and it’s all corporate now. And all the pesticides and all that stuff. But what these old vines represent is a lot. We’re not irrigating this vineyard, and it has an economic crop that doesn’t have any water input! Carignane is one of those varieties that you can do it with—and should do it with. Just think about all the arid land that’s in California that you can plant—with a way better grape without having to worry about water.”

“My intent is not to just make the wine, but to save it,” he says. “This is an important vineyard right now—but I’m not going to live forever.  Hopefully I can leave something better than I got it.”

He waits a beat before launching the question at the center of it all: “If we lose this, where else is it being done?”