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)
