94pts Jeb Dunnuck

The 2023 Zinfandel Hartford Vineyard is a youthful magenta color and is ripe and fruity on the nose with notes of mocha, baking spice, black raspberries, candied flowers, preserved berries, and dried earth. It’s juicy and fruity on the palate, with an approachable feel, a silky, fruity texture, and a medium to full-bodied frame, with more red fruit lifting the wine nicely. Drink 2025-2032

Tasting Notes

The 2023 Hartford Vineyard is an elegant and powerful Zinfandel with blackberry, boysenberry and allspice aromas, which are echoed on the palate. Black cherry flavors are balanced by subtle fennel and dried herb notes alongside a spicy, cinnamon stick finish. The well-integrated tannins extend the complex flavors, giving the wine great length.

About the Wine

Hartford Family Winery proprietors Don and Jenny Hartford tend this 100+-year-old vineyard located on seven acres along Wood Road in the Russian River AVA of Sonoma County. The vineyard is head-pruned and produces low yields of about 1 ton / acre. Most vines produce only several clusters of intensely flavored grapes each year. Wood  Road has well-drained, low fertility, sandy loam soils about two to three feet in depth over deeper layers of compacted sandy loam of about four to six inches. Since the Italian immigrants who planted the Wood Road Vineyard in the early 1900s wanted to ensure long vine life and moisture for their dry-farmed vines, they placed a blasting cap where each vine was to be planted and blasted through the compacted layer. Today we continue to enjoy the fruits of their ingenuity and celebrate the legacy of "dynamite" Zinfandels. The Hartford Vineyard has also been farmed using organic and biodynamic practices since 2004.

Winery Notes

Hartford Family Winery was founded in 1993 as a result of Don and Jennifer Hartford's appreciation for the wines, the people, and the unique vineyards near their Russian River Valley home. Located in the Sonoma County town of Forestville, the winery is about 15 miles from the cool Pacific Coast. 

Making delicious wines of high personality is directly related to the difficult locations of the Hartford family's vineyard sources, the limited production of their bottlings and the varietals they use. "Character through adversity" is an expression that the Hartford family believes to apply to both people and grapevines, and they feel that surviving adversity builds character, and personality, in both. The Hartford Family makes wines under two marks, Hartford Court and Hartford.