Godfather of Zin at 801 Chop House tonight

Jerry Seps was a tenured professor of history at Stanford University when he decided to quit and buy an 80-acre parcel of neglected vineyard in Napa Valley. That was in 1976, right before the Judgment of Paris, when the rest of the world regarded Napa Valley wines as somewhere between jug wine and white lightning. Because the price per acre hadn’t skyrocketed, new growers could afford to take risks, and Seps did, by planting a grape called zinfandel and calling his winery Storybook.

Zinfandel had started to make the news for all the wrong reasons. The year before, Sutter Home had found that sickly sweet white zin would fly off the shelves, and pretty soon zinfandel was synonymous with everything that was bad about American wine. Still, Seps kept the grapes growing, and in 1983, he released Storybook’s first zin (a red, mind you). Since then, Storybook has been served at official White House gatherings and has been the most acclaimed wine at ZAP (Zinfandel Advocates and Producers), which Seps started and which holds the largest zinfandel festival in the world.

Tonight, Seps makes an appearance at 801 Chop House to talk about the early days of zinfandel and where it will go.