ZD Wines

The Free Bacchus Story

Norman deLeuze designed rockets for a living. In the late 1950s he and Gino Zepponi, a fellow engineer, were both working at Aerojet-General in Sacramento, and in 1969 the two of them and their wives, Rosa Lee deLeuze and Barbara Zepponi, started a winery. Z and D are the founders’ initials. To an engineer the letters also mean zero defects, the term for work without flaws.

It began as a weekend project. Both men kept their full-time jobs, and a bank turned down their request for a $6,000 loan to get started. Gino Zepponi died in a car accident in 1985, and the deLeuzes bought his share. Their son Robert had already taken over as winemaker in 1983, when he was, the family says, the youngest winemaker in Napa Valley. The second and third generations of deLeuzes run the winery today, on the Silverado Trail in Rutherford.

ZD calls Abacus its pinnacle wine. The winery has made a Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon every year since 1992, and Abacus is a solera of it, a blend that is topped up with each new vintage and never emptied, so every release holds some of every year before it. The current release, the twenty-seventh, blends 33 vintages, from 1992 to 2024. A medallion on the bottle shows an abacus with the first and last years counted out in beads.

CCOF, the California organic certifier, certifies the grapes ZD grows on its own land: a 3.2-acre vineyard on the Silverado Trail in Rutherford and 29 acres of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in Carneros. The family also keeps bees, owl boxes and chickens, and uses solar power at the winery. The organic certificate stops at the grapes. On the US organic register, ZD’s wine certificate covers bulk wine only, and at the made-with-organic-grapes level, which allows added sulfites. So no ZD bottle is certified organic wine, and none can carry the USDA organic seal.