History
The Doolings began looking in 1975 for ground outside the established growing areas. What they bought was part of a 1,280 acre ranch belonging to Ida Louise Jackson, the first Black teacher in Oakland's public schools, who had run peacocks on it and sold the feathers to Bay Area hat makers; she and her brother Everett sold in 1979. Accounts of the first Zinfandel give 1979, 1980 and 1981, and the first crop came in 1983, made by Jed Steele at Edmeades. The Mariah label followed in 1991, built with Paul Dolan of Fetzer and carried on by Brown-Forman as an etched bottle at fifty dollars that was described at the time as the first high-end Zinfandel out of Mendocino County. The family leased both its name and its grapes to the company for sixteen years before taking full rights back in 2010. Their daughter Nicole Dooling and her husband Michael Frey farm the vineyard now and bottle a second label, DIRT.
The Site
The vineyard sits near the high point of Mountain View Road, the run from Manchester on Highway 1 over to Boonville, and it is one of the higher islands of the Mendocino Ridge appellation, which admits only land at or above 1,200 feet. Published elevations run from 2,400 to 2,700 feet, well above the fog that fills the valleys below, so the vines take full sun and cold nights without the marine damp that governs the ground beneath them. Reported rainfall runs between seventy and a hundred and twenty inches, almost all of it in winter. The soils are Hugo and Josephine loams over a well-drained subsoil of sandstone-fractured shale. Irrigation came out in the 1990s and the site has been dry-farmed since, with soil organic matter measured as high as twelve percent.
Vines and Blocks
About thirty acres are in vine. Zinfandel came first and remains the signature, put recently at some fourteen acres. Syrah, Petite Sirah and Merlot went in early, and the Syrah and Merlot have since been worked over to Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. The Pinot Noir runs Dijon 667 and Pommard on 1103 Paulsen, trained to quadrilateral cordon at ten feet by seven. Chardonnay carries clones 76 and 96 and is the one planting that gets water, while the Primitivo sits on Italian material including Trentino and VCR10. No internal blocks are named.
The Wines
Roughly ninety-five percent of the fruit is sold, and the roster of buyers is long for a site this remote. Seghesio and Woodenhead make the Zinfandel; Waits-Mast, ENA, Darling and Las Jaras make the Pinot Noir, with ENA also bottling a Sauvignon Blanc. The family's own label runs to about five hundred cases across Zinfandel, Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc and Primitivo. In 2020 Mariah became the first vineyard verified under the Savory Institute's Land to Market programme, and DIRT's 2021 releases were the first wines to carry its seal. The wines share the mark of the altitude, showing high acid and firm structure along with a savoury edge that Zinfandel rarely holds anywhere warmer.