Field blend

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A field blend is a wine that is produced from two or more different grape varieties interplanted in the same vineyard.

In the days before precise varietal identification, let alone rigorous clonal selection, a vineyard might be planted by taking cuttings from another vineyard and therefore approximately copying its genetic makeup. This meant that one vine could be zinfandel and the next carignan. When making wine with little equipment to spare for separate vinification of different varieties, field blends allowed effortless, though inflexible, blending.

Fermentation tanks are now cheap enough that the field blend is an anachronism, and almost all wines are assembled by blending from smaller, individual lots. However, in California some of the oldest (and lowest-yielding) zinfandel comes from vineyards that are field-blended. Ridge Vineyards owns the Lytton Springs vineyards in Sonoma, which were planted from 1900 to 1905 in what Ridge calls "a traditional field blend of about seventy percent zinfandel, twenty percent petite sirah, and ten percent grenache and carignane."

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