Bucklin Bambino – Why Field Blends are Great, Fascinating and Highly Illogical 🖖

2023 Bucklin “Bambino” Old Hill Ranch Field Blend

The field blend is a style of winemaking that exists all over the world but which I distinctly associate with California’s older plantings.  They are some of California’s most original and least understood wines. While Ridge is justifiably celebrated for their Geyserville and Lytton Springs bottlings, there are many other California producers just as deserving of interest, including Desire Lines, Bedrock and Bucklin.

Bucklin’s “Bambino” is a GREAT place to get started with field blends as it is delicious, authentic and affordable.  

It’s a blend of Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, Alicante Bouchet, Grenache, Syrah and Mourvedre with vines approaching 30 years of age but which take the baton from much older plantings on Bucklin’s Old Hill Ranch site. Just adjacent to this planting are vines used for their “Ancient” field blend dating back to 1885, with as many as 30 varieties including weird alpine rarities, several white grapes, DNA mysteries and even native US variety Catawba.  That is so unbelievably random. I fucking love it.  MORE CHAOS PLEASE.

With Bambino you taste the promise of this very original, very Sonoman wine. Even with youngish vines, it's a treat – dark, soft, wooly brambleberries, slightly tawnied notes of red fruit that almost feel a bit bottle-aged, zesty young acidity and a range of herbal, peppery accents that complement the pretty, lithe fruit.  

So what does that actually mean?  It’s a soft, fullish, berry-packed wine with the qualities of young and middle-aged wine together.  It’s accessible and gets its complexity from the variety of …varieties as well as its diversity of textures.  Field blending creates and maintains the complexity of the wine.  It’s also ridiculously easy to drink.  

I love Bambino and wines like it because it’s got loads of Sonoma personality.  The region’s Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays are truly incredible quality, but they are forever to be judged against their Burgundian antecedents.  Field blends get to offer a one-of-a-kind experience, with history, romance and a bit of “you can’t explain that.”  They are like weird investment funds you inherited that shouldn’t beat the market but somehow they DO.

Originally planted in 1851 (or was it 1852?), Old Hill Ranch exists as one of the longest continually farmed vineyards in California, possibly the very oldest.  William McPherson Hill was the first person to bring non-Mission grapes to Sonoma, paving the way for Zinfandel and the kitchen sink blend of grapes brought from several countries in Europe. The site is now owned by the four Bucklin siblings and run by Will Bucklin.

With no long-standing traditions or prolonged analysis by lonely monks, Sonoma vineyards became borderless terroir – patchwork collections representing a “melting pot” of flavors.

Field blends were practical, too:  a heterogenous mix of grapes meant that “down” years for certain grapes could be compensated for by more resilient varieties.  This hedging of bets meant you could reliably get wine each year – and as a bonus, it keeps things interesting.

You can find older examples of Old Hill Ranch field blends made by Joel Peterson during the pre-sale Ravenswood era.  These wines, often with over 30 years of age on them, still deliver impressive experiences.  Joel continues to make OHR wines under the Once & Future label, as does his son Morgan with his Bedrock label.

Bambino is available directly from Bucklin’s website as well as being distributed nationally in the US. 

US retail as of this writing is between $27 and $36

I see one European listing in Germany at the very reasonable price of 30 euro.