Paul Draper of Ridge Vineyards and Joel Peterson of Ravenswood were the featured players in a book some years ago about zinfandel, that most American of wines.

The book, Angels Visits: An Inquiry into the Mystery of Zinfandel, was published in 1991 and became a sort of an unofficial bible for the growing cult of zinfandel lovers who have since grown into a mighty force.

Last month, thousands of them descended on San Francisco to attend the annual ZAP's 18th Annual Zinfandel Festival staged by Zinfandel Advocates and Producers, and to taste hundreds of examples of the dark red wine, 99 percent of which is made in California.

Ridge and Ravenswood wines were joined by 250 other producers who poured samples to attendees, and the room was heady with optimism for the opulent 2007 vintage zins, most of which were served as barrel samples. Few have yet been bottled.

Among the names of zin specialists there were Storybook Mountain, Artezin, Wine Guerrilla, Trentadue, Jessies Grove, Hook and Ladder, Kenwood, Scott Harvey, Sobon Estate, and Unti.

Also among the pourers was Haywood Estate, and few of the attendees knew of the rather circuitous journey Peter Haywood took to get back into the zin fold.

His story starts in a non-wine-like way, with Haywood earning a political science degree from Stanford University, serving in the Marine Corps, and owning a successful San Francisco-area construction company.

In 1973, seeking a greener lifestyle, Haywood bought 280 acres of rugged hillside land a mile east of Sonoma in Sonoma Valley. During that early era in Sonoma it was known that zinfandel grew well in local hillsides.

Haywood didnt realize how well until his new zinfandel plantings and his development of the Haywood brand in the early 1980s began putting bottles in the hands of zin lovers.

Calling his ranch Los Chamizal, Haywood soon was selling out of his Zinfandels -- and it was pretty much all he made.

But marketing had become a chore, and Haywood, by now really more a farmer than anything else, hated being on the road for months each year hawking his wines. At last in 1991, the year zinfandel really took off -- Haywood sold his brand to Racke International, a German company that also owned Buena Vista Winery.

But Haywood did the smartest thing: He kept the land on which the zin grew.

One of Rackes strategies was to expand production, creating a lower-priced Haywood Vintners Select tier of wines that did not make use of the fabulous Los Chamizal fruit. Continued...