2022 Williams Selyem Zinfandel Papera Vineyard Russian River Valley 750 ml

In 1979, Burt Williams and Ed Selyem alchemized a few tons of grapes they had gotten for free into their first wine. Their first vintage under the Williams Selyem name came in 1984, and a year later they introduced the world to their very first single-vineyard Pinot, from the Rochioli Vineyard in Russian River Valley. That bottle bested more than 2,000 others to win top red wine at the 1987 California State Fair.

That same year, demand for Williams Selyem exceeded supply, a milestone that brought them permanently into the world of “cult” wine—long before that term had even been used to describe the class of high-quality, never-enough-to-go-around wines that thousands of devoted fans anticipate every season. 1987 also marked the debut of the Williams Selyem waitlist, which gave Pinot lovers a reliable—but unbearably slow—way to score wines from Williams Selyem. A wait of two or three years is now customary. 

The Pinots are precious. Lesser-known is their Papera Zin, which is grown on plantings from 1934—the year after the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition—and stands as one of the finest in Sonoma County. 

A note about age: One of the greatest dinners of our lives came the night one of our collector friends tapped into his Williams Selyem collection. We tasted a dozen bottlings dating from 2005 back to 1989, when the winery was a relative upstart. Every single sip was awash in gorgeous California red-berry fruit, and each wine on our journey back through the years revealed a little more fruit complexity—and a little more disbelief that what was in our glasses wasn’t a perfectly cellared Burgundy of the highest order.