Just as the harvest of vintage 2024 gets under way in California, Amador County’s wine community is being jolted by news that Trinchero Family Estates is closing and putting on the market its Shenandoah Valley winery Terra d’Oro.

While Terra d’Oro and its sister brand Montevina are to continue, their wines will be made at Trinchero facilities at Lodi and St. Helena, says the company’s vice president of communications, Elizabeth Hooker. Trinchero will sell its Shenandoah Valley winery and at least some of its 500 acres in surrounding vineyards, but details and price still are developing, she indicates.

“The sale of Terra d’Oro will allow us to channel our resources into areas where we see the greatest potential for innovation and expansion, allowing us to remain competitive in a challenging wine market,” she adds.

Trinchero is to leave its hulking and handsome 63,000-square-foot facility along Shenandoah School Road at the end of the year. Sunday will be the last day that the winery’s tasting room is to be open.

The closure of Terra d’Oro brings to an end one of the more enduring and influential chapters in the story of the development of the modern wine trade in the Sierra foothills.

Terra d’Oro originated as a brand of Montevina Winery in 1995. The Trinchero family had bought Montevina in 1988, a purchase motivated in part by business acumen, in part by sentiment. The switch in primary name from Montevina to Terra d’Oro in 2009 was to represent a heightened focus on the winery’s upscale wines and to reinforce the winery’s presence in Northern California’s Gold Country. The Montevina brand was retained for basic, immediately accessible table wines at modest prices. Terra d’Oro wines tended to be under cork, Montevina under screwcap.

Cary Gott, his wife Victoria, and her father, Gilroy banker W.H. Field, arrived in Amador County’s Shenandoah Valley in 1970 with visions of vineyards and a winery in mind. At the time, the only commercial winery in the valley was the historic D’Agostini Winery, dating from the mid-1800s. Gott, who had earlier worked in the cellars of Napa Valley wineries Inglenook and Sterling, said at the time that the family chose Amador County because land prices were less costly than in other California wine regions, and because the county’s signature grape variety and varietal wine, Zinfandel, was rising in popularity and esteem.

The Gotts and Field bought 80 acres of 80-year-old vines on the Shenandoah Valley’s Massoni Ranch, and during their first four years added 100 acres of vines, many of them grape varieties untested in the area, such as Barbera, Nebbiolo and Cabernet Sauvignon, though most of their acreage was devoted to Zinfandel.

In 1973, Gott, working in the basement and on the patio of the couple’s Shenandoah Valley home, bottled his first 1000 gallons of Zinfandel and White Zinfandel under the Montevina brand, the latter a novelty that would rise fast in popularity later in the decade, in large part because of a sweetly accessible interpretation made by Sutter Home Winery in Napa Valley, owned by the Trinchero family since 1947. In 1987, Sutter Home’s White Zinfandel was the top-selling wine in the United States, and two years later annual production reached 2.7 million cases.

Flush with funds, the Trincheros in 1988 bought Montevina, which the Gotts had left in the hands of Field in 1982. Bob Trinchero, Sutter Home’s longtime winemaker, was well acquainted with Shenandoah Valley Zinfandel. In 1968, he joined Shenandoah Valley grape grower Ken Deaver Sr., Sacramento home winemaker Charles Myers, and Sacramento grocer Darrell Corti for a spring picnic on Deaver’s ranch, where Myers poured a 1965 Zinfandel he had made with grapes from Deaver’s vineyard.

Trinchero was so impressed by the wine’s bouquet, texture and intense, spicy and robust berry flavor he immediately struck a handshake deal with Deaver to buy his Zinfandel that fall. When Sutter Home’s 1968 California Deaver Vineyard Lot 2 Zinfandel (with 13 percent alcohol) was released in 1971 it was such a popular and critical hit that for the first time since the repeal of Prohibition attention was drawn to Amador County Zinfandel, setting off something of a land rush among aspiring vintners.

“It’s a shame,” says Corti of the pending closure. “That is where Zinfandel from Amador County became famous. Sutter Home wasn’t the first (to make Zinfandel with Amador fruit) – Gallo and Christian Brothers had been buying grapes there – but it was the mainstay for several years. It’s the reason why people went up there to start new wineries.”

Footnote: When the Gotts were mulling over a name for their nascent winery in the early 1970s, Corti suggested either Montevigna or Monteviña, Italian and Spanish respectively for “mountain vineyards.” The Gotts opted for Monteviña, but the tilde soon disappeared.

From the start, Montevina, then Terra d’Oro, has been recognized for its dynamic growth, innovative spirit and incubation of talent. Two Amador County winemakers who pulled stints with the winery and then went on to establish their own successful eponymous wineries in Shenandoah Valley are Jeff Runquist and Scott Harvey, the latter of whom worked alongside Gott in 1974, and who credits that task with sparking his interest in winemaking.

At that time, Gott set the tone for Montevina’s inventive spunk when he released just a few months after his first harvest a Zinfandel Nuevo, a Beaujolais-style interpretation that departed radically from the blustery takes on the variety that previously had been the model for Zinfandel out of Amador County.

Montevina and Terra d’Oro went on to pioneer and popularize in the area such unfamiliar grape varieties as Teroldego, Aglianico and, most notably, Barbera. The winery’s way with Barbera became so popular that Jeff Meyers, who hired on at Montevina in 1981 and retired 41 years later as “vice president general manager,” was annointed “the Baron of Barbera.” During his tenure, up to 3500 tons of grapes would arrive on the winery’s crush pad each fall, the equivalent of 245,000 cases of wine, though not all of it was bottled under the winery’s brands, with much of the surplus shopped to Trinchero’s other facilities for other brands. Lately, Terra d’Oro has been bottling around 65,000 cases a year.

In recent years, Terra d’Oro’s inventiveness has continued under the direction of winemaker Emily Haines, who continued to raise the winery’s reputation for creativity by overseeing imaginative proprietary blends such as “Donna Avida,” a vigorous mix of Syrah, Tempranillo, Graciano, Viognier, Barbera and Freisa, and “Condivisa,” a seamless and layered mix of Barbera and Aglianico from Amador County and Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa County.

Still, Zinfandel endured as the property’s signature wine, with four interpretations customarily made each vintage, including one from the neighboring Ken Deaver vineyard that set off the county’s rebound as a wine region in the 1960s.

Trinchero officials are largely mum on their reasons for closing Terra d’Oro, and Megan Van Hook, acting executive director of the Amador Vintners Assication, said the group would not immediately comment on the development.

Individually, members of the Amador County wine community said they were taken by surprise by the closure, though Trinchero had been pulling out some of its vines and trying to sell other plots over the past couple of years. By and large, they see the closure as a concession to the current marketing struggles of the wine trade as sales stagger worldwide.

“It’s a tough time in the industry,” says Terra d’Oro winemaker Emily Haines, who declined to elaborate on Trinchero’s reasoning. (She did say, however, that the winery is securing homes for its den of resident and feral cats that long have been identified with the site.)

Chris Leamy put in 17 years at the winery, starting as assistant winemaker in 2000 and being promoted to winemaker in 2004; he left in 2017. He sees the closure as a sign of how costly winemaking has become. “It’s expensive to run a winery, and the brand probably could not support that expense. All wineries are seeing increasing costs that are not reflected in increased bottle costs, and I feel this is a consequence of that,” says Leamy, now senior winemaker at Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi in Lodi.

Cary Gott, the founder of Montevina, now a Napa Valley wine consultant recognized for helping establish successful wineries in Sonoma and Napa, says, “I was surprised. They spent a lot of money to buy that property and to build a new winery. They tried to build the brand, but it didn’t work for them. I don’t know why it didn’t work.” (Though Gott fondly remembers his time in Amador County and continues to think highly of the area’s potential for fine wine, he isn’t interested in returning, having settled into a new home at St. Helena, continuing his prospering consulting gigs, and helping entertain his grandchildren.)

Jeff Meyers, whose stay on the property was longer than anyone’s, attributes the closure to the expense of keeping such a large facility operating for brands modestly priced. He also noted that Amador’s soils struggle to yield large crops of quality fruit, that when vines produce more than three to four tons an acre the resulting wine isn’t particularly dramatic and compelling. “You could get really good quality fruit off of (the vineyards) in the three- to four-ton range, but if you pushed it past that you tended to lose structure, color, intensity,” says Meyers.

Some winemakers suggested that Trinchero’s attention in recent years has been diverted from the foothills to the central coast, and from Terra d’Oro/Montevina to its many other brands. (Wine Business Monthly earlier this year reported that Trinchero is the nation’s third largest winery, selling 20 million cases annually, employing 1000, and marketing more than 50 wine and spirits brands, including Sutter Home Family Vineyards,Ménage à Trois, Seaglass, Mason, Neyers, and Joel Gott, the immensely popular eponymous label of the son of Cary and Victoria Gott.)

To a person, they expressed appreciation for the Trinchero family’s careful stewardship of vineyards, its industrious build out of the winery, and its finely honed marketing chops, while also concurring that their absence leaves a void that could be difficult to fill.

“They had an extremely strong marketing arm that got Amador out there in the marketplace. Amador is much better known now than it would be if they hadn’t been around,” says Scott Harvey.

Chris Leamy concurs. “I personally spent between six to 10 weeks a year out on the road sharing the Amador story. It was a lot of fun introducing people to the great wines the region can produce. I feel Amador County’s wine region owes a lot to this brand,” he says.

For Jeff Meyers, the closure of Terra d’Oro/Montevina is particularly poignant, but he agrees that its presence elevated the county’s profile for fine wine. “We spent 40 years telling the Amador County story nationwide. We would travel all over the country every year to most of the major markets and do lunches and dinners and account calls and seminars and distributor meetings and on and on telling our story,” recalls Myers.

“Stepping back, I think about all the people who drank our wine and enjoyed it, and looked forward to drinking it and having it on that special occasion or coming to the winery for tastings with their family and friends, and how much fun and joy we brought them. You can’t believe all the pictures we would get of these crazy people carrying our wine all over the world and drinking it in some exotic locale. Wild. It’s pretty cool to think about that,” he adds.

To find a copy of my book “The Signature Wines of Superior California: 50 Wines that Define the Sierra Foothills, the Delta, Yolo and Lodi,” please visit my website SignatureWines.us.