As a lover of Port, especially 20-year-old Tawny, doing this story was a dream come true. My wine journey began with sweet wines, ports, cream sherries, and muscats. While I’ve since developed a preference for bone-dry reds, I still have a soft spot for those luscious Tawny Ports. They’re like an old friend who never fails to bring a smile to my face and warmth to my evening.

The year was 1946. While most Americans were busy readjusting to civilian life after World War II, the Ficklin clan decided that what post-war America really needed was a good stiff drink. But not just any drink. They made Port, a wine fortified with brandy.

As Peter Ficklin explains, “So with my father’s interest in wine and winemaking as well as my grandfather’s, the winery was founded back in September 1946. Some family grapes were planted and my grandfather Walter handled sales and marketing.”

Peter, the current maestro of this vinous symphony, has more wine knowledge in his pinky than most of us have in our entire liquor cabinets. He’s like the Yoda of port. Peter’s family history reads like a Viking soap opera crossed with a wine trader’s diary. As he puts it, “There’s some Scandinavian in there and some Northern European, of course, but you know it was the British and the Dutch traders who developed the port industry.”

The Ficklin saga kicks off with Peter’s grandfather Walter and father David deciding to plant some grapes back in ’46. But these weren’t your run-of-the-mill table grapes. They went full Portuguese, bringing in varieties that sound like they were named by someone who’d had a few too many glasses of the final product. Tinta Madeira? Touriga? It sounds like they were just cheating at viticultural Scrabble.

Peter explains their unique position: “If you think about the history of the California wine industry, it was all inexpensive muscatels, ports, touquets, sherries, inexpensive imitations of the real thing and so no one was in the premium segment at that time and so the family decided to make ports using traditional Portuguese grape varieties as well as time-honored techniques the Portuguese had been using for years.”

The winery itself embodies DIY spirit and old-school craftsmanship. Peter proudly recounts, “My father built the adobe brick building, all handmade bricks from local soil. That was in 1947 and our first crush of Portuguese grape varietals was in 1948 and we still have wines in the cellar from 1948.”

So while other post-war Americans were busy buying prefab houses and TV dinners, David Ficklin was out there making bricks like some kind of wine-obsessed Egyptian pharaoh.

The Ficklin cellar is a vinous library, with bottles dating to 1948. They’ve got wines older than most of your grandparents’ marriages, and probably with fewer issues. They still use some of the same equipment from those early days. There’s a wood press that’s been squeezing grapes since Truman was in office. It’s the Keith Richards of winemaking equipment – old, weathered, not sure why it’s still alive but getting the job done.

What really sets Ficklin apart is their use of the Solera system, a method that’s like playing musical chairs with wine barrels. Peter explains, “It’s a fractional blending system. So what we do is we have barrels and punchings over there, probably 250 barrels, and we go to each of those barrels and remove perhaps a quarter to a third of the wine in those and get that ready to bottle. Once we’ve bottled that, then we’ll take the 65 punchings, the larger oak containers, and take the wine a similar percentage and refill, top up the barrels in that system.”

The result? A blend that contains a smidgen of every vintage going back to 1948. As Peter puts it, “So in this bottle, in those barrels, in those punchings, and in this glass is a diminishing percentage of wines from 1948, 1949, and on through the years. So it’s a literal picture, a living picture of the history of the wines that we’ve made here.”

Ficklin isn’t resting on its laurels and dusty old bottles. They’re innovators, too. Take their rosé port, for example. Peter boasts, “We were really the first to do this in a small quantity and then of course the Portuguese said that they were starting to do it. We’re kind of frenemies a little bit with them they kind of keep an eye on us and what we’re doing and we of course keep an eye on what’s coming out of theirs but they claim to be the first to do a rosé port but we know better than that.”

A sense of history and family permeates every aspect of the operation. Peter talks about his father and grandfather with the kind of reverence usually reserved for saints or rock stars. And he’s not just preserving their legacy; he’s building on it, creating wines that’ll be enjoyed long after he’s gone to that big wine cellar in the sky.

Ficklin Vineyards is where history meets innovation, tradition dances with experimentation, and every bottle tells a story. It’s a place where you can sip on liquid history, geek out over century-old winemaking equipment, and maybe, just maybe, discover that port isn’t just for your great-aunt Edna anymore.

Next time you’re in the mood for something a little different, something with more character than a Dickens novel and more complexity than quantum physics, reach for a bottle of Ficklin.

Your taste buds will thank you, your dinner guests will be impressed, and who knows? You might just find yourself waxing poetic about tawny hues and solera systems before you know it. Just remember to sip responsibly – this isn’t your average plonk, and before you know it, you might find yourself building an adobe winery in your backyard.

Cheers, Port people!