The Bechthold Vineyard and its resulting wines do not seem to belong in Lodi. In the northern stretches of the Central Valley, Lodi has a reputation for producing wines of size and heft: Sweet and fortified wines made the region successful through the early and mid-twentieth century, and brawny red blends buoy it today.

Yet here is Bechthold, in the southwestern Lodi sub-AVA of Mokelumne River, a 25-acre standing of ungrafted, dry-farmed, organic Cinsault (pronounced sin-SO) vines planted in 1886. These ancient plants produce red wines that are ethereal and diaphanous, clear refutations of any notion that intensity of color is linked to complexity of flavor — and of any stereotype of Lodi wines.

Bechthold (pronounced BECK-told) is the oldest continuously farmed vineyard in Lodi. It is Lodi’s only known planting of Cinsault , a red grape from southern France mostly used as a minor component in blends, especially in Provencal rosé. Not only that: Bechthold is likely the oldest existing planting of Cinsault in the world. (France’s Cinsault would have been replanted in the early twentieth century after the louse phylloxera wiped out virtually all of the country’s grapevines.)

It seems crazy that, in an era when most California vineyards were planted to hearty, dark-fruited varieties like Zinfandel and Carignan, anyone would have chosen a grape that ekes out a pale, elusive wine, even in a hot year. It seems even crazier that nothing over the last 133 years — neither Prohibition nor the jug wine economy nor the modern preference for rich, ripe wines — compelled anyone to rip out these anomalous vines.

“Lodi’s not known for Pinot Noir, but I consider this to be Lodi’s version of Pinot Noir,” says Michael David Winery owner Kevin Phillips, who farms the Bechthold Vineyard under a long-term lease.

But for most of Bechthold’s history, the vineyard hid in plain sight, its grapes blended away into larger-volume wines. Only in the last decade has this terroir begun to receive the recognition it deserves, with a new crop of winemakers from Lodi and beyond, including Birichino, Onesta, Two Shepherds and Fields Family, doing justice to its singular fruit.

“I could easily absorb the entire vineyard now,” Phillips says. His Michael David Winery, which produces popular brands like Seven Deadly Zins, is large: It farms more than 1,500 acres worth of vines and still has to purchase fruit, so using up Bechthold’s measly 25 acres in-house would be an easy call. But the Bechthold fruit is too special to keep all for himself, Phillips says: “A lot of these coastal wineries from Napa and Sonoma might not have another Lodi-based wine other than Bechthold.”

“I continue to sell the fruit,” he continues, “because I believe it’s good for Lodi.”

Bechthold’s story begins with Joseph Spenker, a German immigrant who came to California in the 1850s in a covered wagon hoping for gold. Mining didn’t pan out, but he eventually managed to buy a square mile of land in Lodi, where he grew grapes and wheat.

At the center of his property — which remains owned by Spenker’s descendants — he planted what he believed to be Black Malvasia, often sold as a table grape. “The reality is, back then, there weren’t a lot of varietal bottlings,” says Turley winemaker Tegan Passalacqua, who has made a Bechthold wine since 2008. Lodi’s signature crop? Another table grape, Flame Tokay.

It would be 117 years before anyone would learn that Bechthold’s Black Malvasia was actually Cinsault.

In the early days, El Pinal winery in Stockton took the grapes; later, Gallo moved in, paying a mere pittance for the Black Malvasia. The ranch passed through generations of Spenkers, with the central portion eventually falling under the care of Al Bechthold, who married Spenker’s great-granddaughter Wanda Woock in 1977.

So undervalued were these so-called Black Malvasia grapes that, for decades, they weren’t even being used for commercial wine. “From the ’70s on, the grapes had been getting packed and shipped to home winemakers on the east coast,” Phillips says.

Then in 2003, Kay Bogart, program director at UC Davis’ viticulture and enology program, took notice of the Bechthold vines when she was visiting the neighboring Jessie’s Grove Winery, which is owned by Wanda Woock Bechthold’s son Greg Burns. The family had been considering ripping out the Black Malvasia; it just wasn’t profitable. But Bogart took vine cuttings back to Davis and, with the help of Professor Andy Walker, quickly discovered that it wasn’t Black Malvasia at all. This was Cinsault.

It didn’t take long before word reached Bonny Doon winemaker Randall Grahm, who had been on the lookout for some Cinsault to flesh out his southern France-style blends. For about five years, Grahm bought almost the entire Bechthold Vineyard’s haul — which paid considerably more than the east coast home-winemaking kits had.

“It was always my favorite vineyard we worked with,” says Jillian Johnson, who was Bonny Doon’s assistant winemaker at the time. “Almost every red wine we made at Bonny Doon got a little touch of that Cinsault.”

Wherever it appeared, the Bechthold fruit would always add aroma and lift, Johnson says. “It’s always had this really great texture without being tannic, and it’s very fruit-forward. In the warmer years I describe the wine as a strawberry rhubarb pie.” Now, Johnson makes a Bechthold Cinsault under her own label, Onesta, as does another Bonny Doon alum, John Locke of Birichino.

In 2007, Al Bechthold approached Phillips, who owns a neighboring parcel. He asked if Phillips would take over the farming. “Al was about 80, and he was getting tired,” Phillips says. “I wasn’t really in the business of leasing vineyards in that way, but for Al, I decided to do it.” (Al Bechthold died in 2014.)

But Phillips soon had to get resourceful. The recession hit, and Bonny Doon decided to stop buying Bechthold fruit. Phillips scrambled to find other suitors. Many winemakers, especially those based outside the region, were skeptical: Lodi Cinsault? It took some convincing, but in 2008 Phillips got Napa’s Turley Wine Cellars to take 5 tons of fruit off his hands.

“Everyone at Turley basically made fun of me, because they thought I picked it way too early,” says Passalacqua, the Turley winemaker. The destemmed portion of the wine he made tasted unremarkable: simple, fruity, lacking structure. But Passalacqua had an idea. What if he modeled his wine on the great Domaine d’Aupilhac in southern France, which ferments its old-vine Cinsault grapes with their stems? When Passalacqua employed stem inclusion on the rest of his Bechthold fruit, it turned out beautifully — and unlike anything he’d made before.

“It was a really different Turley wine,” Passalacqua says, in that it wasn’t rich or big or high in alcohol. But it became the winery staff’s favorite wine to throw back at parties.

Passalacqua, in turn, converted other skeptics. It took two years, but he persuaded Scholium Project winemaker Abe Schoener to come see Bechthold. “I thought, ‘I can’t make wines from this,’” Schoener recalls of his first visit. “The yields seemed excessive. The berries were really big.” He’d seen a couple of other Lodi vineyards that were clearly being farmed for maximum volume, rather than quality; he assumed Bechthold was the same.

Schoener gradually came around. Like Passalacqua, he discovered that Bechthold fruit did not want to make a deeply colored red wine. It needed a gentle extraction and whole-cluster fermentation. It was, Schoener says, “more like a white wine vineyard than a red wine vineyard.”

“Instead of modeling this on the Ridge Mataro from the 1970s” — Schoener’s original idea; a rustic, muscular type of wine — “I realized we should be making a completely different wine that embraces the lightness of the fruit and does not try to achieve density,” he says.

The trial and error that Bechthold required of these winemakers shows just how confounding this vineyard is: It turns many widely accepted California-wine axioms on their heads. Whereas low-yielding vines are prized in regions like Napa, Bechthold’s vines can throw an astonishing 12 tons per acre without sacrificing one bit of character. While many century-old vineyards are fragile and withering, Bechthold, at 133 years old, is as robust and spry as an Olympic athlete.

“Unfortunately it would take a mammoth undertaking to try to replicate it,” says Phillips of the vineyard. “The vine age, the dry farming, the fact that it’s on its own rootstock — it’s more than people could envision in a generation.”

It’s probably more than Joseph Spenker, that unsuccessful speculator, could have envisioned for multiple generations. The Bechthold Vineyard’s near-impossible confluence of place, plant and people took a century to reveal itself. Who knows what lies ahead of it?

“The notion that vines decline after 100 years is obviously false,” Schoener says. “These vines are indestructible.”