J Dusi Zinfandel

Tasting notes & discussion 30

Typically $48/bottle from J. Dusi Wines
Vintage 2024 from Templeton Gap
Available for AZ; CA; CO; CT; DC; FL; GA; ID; IL; IN; IA; KS; KY; LA; ME; MD; MA; MI; MN; MO; MT; NE; NV; NH; NJ; NM; NY; NC; ND; OH; OK; OR; PA; RI; SC; SD; TN; TX; VT; VA; WA; WV; WI; WY
Sold by participating winery or licensee, fulfilled by Wine Country Connect

About J. Dusi Wines: “Bringing J Dusi into the public realm of the wine industry has been a life-long dream for me. I grew up living on the vineyard, participating in grape farming, and begging for my Grandfather to teach me the winemaking process. My first vintage was when I was sixteen.”

Mountains Funnel, Grapes Deal

TASTING NOTES: “In the Templeton Gap AVA this historic vineyard was planted in 1945. Dante Dusi Vineyard is head trained and dry farmed by five generations of the Dusi Family.” (AbV 14.9%)

VARIETALS: 100% Zinfandel

BARRELS: 16 Months; French Oak 80%, American Oak 20%

PAIRS WITH: N/A

THAT REMINDS ME OF: Templeton Gap

There’s an actual gap. Not a marketing flourish — the Templeton Gap is a literal low point in the Santa Lucia Range where the coastal mountains dip down enough that Pacific fog and wind pour straight through it into Paso Robles every afternoon, like the landscape has a keyhole. Meteorologists call this a “gap wind,” and it’s a real, named category of weather phenomenon: air gets squeezed through a mountain constriction and speeds up on the way out, the same way water picks up speed through a narrower part of a hose (Bernoulli’s been explaining this since the 1700s and it still feels like a magic trick).

Templeton’s isn’t even the famous one. The Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico gets gap winds so violent — funneled between the Sierra Madre ranges — that they generate their own hurricane-strength gusts sailors nicknamed “Tehuantepecers,” strong enough to be visible from space as a streak of whitecaps in satellite photos. San Gorgonio Pass outside Palm Springs does the same trick, which is why it’s now covered in wind turbines instead of, say, houses. Every one of these gaps works on the exact same dumb, elegant physics: mountains funnel air, air speeds up, something downstream has to deal with it. In Tehuantepec it’s fishing boats. In Templeton, apparently, it’s grapes.

PRODUCER PODCAST: J Dusi Zinfandel (1:02)

Who's buying this?

How are you buying your bottles?

Mountains funnel air into famous gap winds all over the world — where would you want to feel one hit you?

Somewhere I could watch it roll in over vineyards

Somewhere I could watch it roll in over vineyards
Out on a boat, if I'm being honest with myself

Out on a boat, if I'm being honest with myself
Standing next to a wind turbine field, just to feel small

Standing next to a wind turbine field, just to feel small
Nowhere, I'd rather read about it from somewhere still

Nowhere, I'd rather read about it from somewhere still
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J Dusi Zinfandel

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Mountains funnel air into famous gap winds all over the world — where would you want to feel one hit you?

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