In the latter part of the 1800s and the early 1900s, Oakley, California was a picturesque farming community. Oakley, in eastern Contra Costa County, is equidistant between Sacramento to the northeast and San Francisco to the west. Situated on the banks of the San Joaquin river at the point where the Sacramento river merges, the two journey west to empty into the San Francisco Bay. At the turn of the 20th century, Oakley was home to a number of Portuguese and Italian immigrants who found many similarities to the Mediterranean climate they had left behind. They planted thousands of acres of orchards and vineyards. Today, a century later, due to the devastation of phylloxera and the encroachment of commercial and residential development, only 600 acres of vineyards remain in this evolving community. Cline owns and controls 300 of those acres including some of the oldest surviving vines in California; a little bit of history. Fred Cline's maternal grandfather, Valeriano Jacuzzi who founded the famous pump and spa company with his brothers, called Oakley home. On summer visits to his grandparents, where he escaped the suburban Southern California life that had attracted his father, Fred learned from his grandfather both the love of the agricultural life and the mysteries of the vinification of grapes into wine. These lessons led Fred to U.C. Davis to study agriculture management, a rebellious departure from the U.C. Berkeley tradition of his father and paternal grandfather. After attaining his degree, in 1982 Fred returned to Oakley to found the company that would become Cline Cellars. There he started producing wines and restoring ancient vines. In 1991, the winery relocated from Oakley to the Carneros region of Sonoma County on a historic 350-acre estate with new vineyards and facilities. While much of the cool Carneros region is planted to Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Merlot, Fred Cline pioneered the planting of Rhône varietals including Syrah, Viognier, Marsanne and Roussanne. In 1997, Cline ventured further west into an even cooler growing area in eastern Petaluma and again planted more Rhône varietals.

The Bridgehead Zinfandel is consistently the most refined and elegant of the several Zins that we produce. Our Zin has notes of spice and bright blackberry. The wine is firm and deep with notes of chocolate and toasty vanilla. Benefiting from a fine-grained structure of balanced acids and tannins. Its claret-like style and intriguingly complex earthy-berry character make this one of California's most distinct and our most treasured Zinfandels.

• Product Code: WT03CL
• Grower: Cline Cellars
• Grape Variety: Zinfandel
  
• Style: Elegant and Structured
  
• Country: USA
• Appellation: Sonoma
• Vintage: 2009/10
• Alchohol: 15.5% ABV
• Case Size: 6
• Bottle Size: 75cl

Vintage Rating on this wine was 90 (source: Wine Competition Award Wnners)

Closure: CORK

Alternative wine closures are substitute closures used in the wine industry for sealing wine bottles in place of traditional cork closures. The emergence of these alternatives has grown in response to quality control efforts by winemakers to protect against "cork taint" caused by the presence of the chemical trichloroanisole (TCA).

Screw caps or "Stelvin caps" are closures made only from aluminium material that threads onto the bottleneck. They are the predominant closure used by New Zealand wineries.[8][9] This can be attributed in part to the New Zealand screw cap initiative which promotes the use of screw caps instead of cork. Screw caps form a tighter seal and can keep out oxygen for a longer time than cork. These benefits aid in maintaining the wine's overall quality and aging potential.

Vino-Seal, or Vino-Lok, is a plastic/glass closure released by Alcoa. Since its introduction into the European market in 2003, over 300 wineries have utilized Vino-Seal. Using a glass stopper with an inert o-ring, the Vino-Seal creates a hermetic seal that prevents oxidation and TCA contamination.

Zork is an alternative wine closure that seals like a screw cap and pops like a cork. The Zork closure consists of three parts; an outer cap providing a tamper evident clamp that locks onto the band of a standard cork mouth bottle, an inner metal foil which provides an oxygen barrier similar to a screw cap, and an inner plunger which creates the ‘pop’ on extraction and reseals after use.

The traditional crowned bottle cap has been used in the sparkling wine industry as a closure during the bottle fermentation process (méthode traditionnelle). Normally the cap is replaced with a cork before shipping, though recently some producers are releasing wines using the crown cap as their closure.

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