2012 Martinelli Jackass Hill Zinfandel

Recently, our friends treated us to this 2012 Martinelli Jackass Hill Zinfandel. It is a special wine in our friend's and our memories. The story is this. One night early on in our friendship with this couple, my husband decided that we would drink a Martinelli Jackass Hill Zinfandel. At that time, this bottle of wine might have been one of the more prized in our collection. My husband reminded me (don't you remember, I am so disappointed) that we purchased this wine along with a Turley Tofanelli Vineyard Zinfandel at that wine store in Healdsburg.
What to pair it with? Since it was somewhat of an impromptu dinner, we bought pizza. Once the pizza arrived, we opened the bottle and out came a most wondrous perfume like an aroma genii, unseen but nevertheless present, filling our dining room. We all remarked on it and proceeded to drink this wine with pizza. Throughout the evening, we thought that this was the most elegant pairing of wine and food and it became imprinted in our memory and ever after, we referred to that time we had Jackass Hill with pizza.
So, on this night in 2019, our friends decided to recreate the memory of Martinelli Jackass Hill Zinfandel with pizza. I asked our friend, "what year do you think we had the Martinelli?" He said, "sometime before 2004." The wine was as ethereal as ever and we toasted to the memory of our magical first dinner of Martinelli Jackass Hill Zinfandel and pizza.
I did not know this but reading the back label on the bottle, is a story of how the vineyard became known as Jackass Hill. The story is also on the Martinelli Website. The moniker Jackass Hill goes back to the inception of the vineyard in the 1880's when Giuseppe Martinelli bought an impossible to farm slope in Sonoma County and planted it to Zinfandel. Giuseppi's son Leno took over farming the steep hillside after finishing the 8th grade. None of Giuseppi's other sons wanted to farm that hillside saying that only a jackass would farm a hill that steep.
We would never have associated Jackass Hill with such a disparaging story because in our minds and memories, Jackass Hill was elevated to near peerless perfection!