Jug wine is usually plonk. But this California winery makes it into something special
Susan Preston pours some Jim's Jug, the wine that Preston Farm makes specifically for jugs. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
In most circles, the phrase "jug wine" connotes cheap swill. The archetype, Carlo Rossi, is what its $15-for-4-liters price tag would suggest: so sweet and lacking in acidity that it tastes like flat grape soda.
But in a secluded corner of Sonoma County's Dry Creek Valley, jug wine is something else entirely. At Preston Farm & Winery, jugs are vessels for simple but soul-stirringly satisfying wine. And they're part of a California tradition dating back to the 19th century, when bringing your own jug to a local winery was standard procedure.
On Sunday, visitors descended on Preston Farm for their monthly fill-up. While tourists sat in the tasting room or in the gardens for a guided wine tasting, about 50 of Preston's most loyal customers headed for the dark cellar, handing over their green, three-liter jugs - bulbous, with a handle on the tapered neck - for a refill. Owner Lou Preston presided over the weathered barrel whose spigot dispensed a hearty red blend, all the grapes grown organically at the property. Outdoors, children scrambled on the bocce courts and ran around the chicken coops.
Lou Preston personally fills the jugs from a barrel on the first Sunday of each month. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
"Lou has always wanted it to stay true to a historical 19th or early 20th century Northern California field blend," winemaker Grayson Hartley said: Zinfandel-based, with a smattering of other grapes that were planted alongside it, producing a wine that's hearty, fruity and rustic. The current iteration of Preston's jug wine - from the 2023 season, though not vintage-labeled - consists mostly of Zinfandel, with Petite Sirah, Carignan and Cinsault, all varieties that were common in Dry Creek Valley at the turn of the century.
Preston began selling jug wine in 2002, a time when these containers already seemed like an anachronism. In California wine's early days, during the late 1800s, customers would show up to wineries with glass jugs, and winemakers would fill them directly from the barrel. Jugs remained important through Prohibition, when home winemakers were allowed to make up to 200 gallons per year for themselves and needed large, stable receptacles for their hooch.
After Prohibition's repeal, jugs became the poster child of affordable, mass-produced California wine. Wineries such as Gallo, Paul Masson and Almaden made big business out of jug wine, often labeling them erroneously with European geographic terms - Chablis, Sauternes, Burgundy - that bore no relation to the mélange of California-grown grapes they contained, hoping to impute a sense of sophistication.
Winemaker and viticulturist Grayson Hartley fills some Jim's Jug in the cellar. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
As California wine culture advanced, jugs fell out of favor. A new, ambitious crop of Napa Valley winemakers in the 1970s, sparked in part by the influential Judgment of Paris event, wanted to position their wines as equals of the French greats. That meant producing "varietals" - wines made from a single grape variety, as opposed to the unidentifiable blends inside the jugs - which meant 750-ml bottles and higher prices.
But from his perch in rural Dry Creek Valley, Preston was always attracted to the vision of the original jug-wine days - when it was simply the most efficient way for folks to fill up their wine stores. He wanted to revive the tradition: "I felt it ought to be reflective of the way wines used to be made in Dry Creek Valley," he said, "by the local people for the local people."
In 2002, Preston also happened to have a lot of extra wine on hand. He had recently transformed his business model, shifting from a 30,000-case brand that was distributed in 40 states to an 8,000-case one that sold most of its wine from its onsite tasting room. (This coincided with Preston converting his 130-acre property to organic farming and establishing a holistic farm with orchards, vegetable gardens and animals.)
A portrait of the Prestons' longtime friend and neighbor, Jim Guadagni, the namesake of Jim's Jug. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
"The jug program origin has a reality that's earnest" - Preston's yearning for the olden days - "but also it was just addressing a glut of wine they had around that time," Hartley said.
Preston called his blend Guadagni Red, an homage to the farm's late neighbor Jim Guadagni, an "old-timer" farmer with no teeth and a massive throat goiter who "taught me the old way of farming," Preston said. Eventually, so as not to create confusion with the Guadagni family's own winery, he changed it to Jim's Jug.
He wasn't the only vintner doing jug wine fill-ups at the time: Throughout the early aughts, other nearby wineries, including Martin Ray and Foppiano, continued the tradition too. But most others eventually discontinued the jugs at the same time that some of the industrial producers, like Almaden, switched their large-format wines to bag-in box. Preston Farm was one of the final holdouts.
Susan Preston, an artist, stamps the Jim's Jug label, which she designed. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
For about 15 years, every Sunday was jug day at Preston Farm. Lou and his wife Susan Preston would sit in the cellar by the massive barrel containing the current batch, waiting to replenish their customers' inventories. In the mid-2010s, they switched the schedule to one Sunday a month and blew out each event with bands, food trucks and local vendors. "It was a total party here, with kids running around," Hartley said. "To me that was the most meaningful time, the years before the pandemic, for the jug."
When the pandemic hit and Preston Farm closed its tasting room, the jug went away. It wasn't until last year that Preston and Hartley decided to bring it back - on a trial basis, initially. But Preston missed the level of interaction with customers that the fill-up facilitated. And Hartley appreciated having the blend as an outlet for wines that didn't quite make the cut for the winery's higher-end bottled wines. His creation for the jug isn't quite castoff wine, nor is it a cuvee that he's planned out since harvest - it's somewhere in between.
A guest heads back to his car with a couple of Jim's Jugs. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
The 2025 jug wine Sundays were so successful that, as of January, the Preston Farm team decided to officially bring them back as a permanent fixture of the calendar the first Sunday of every month. Hartley hopes to revive the full pre-pandemic festivities with food trucks and live music.
Preston Farm now charges $65 to fill a three-liter jug (the jug itself, a onetime purchase, is $10). That's a hike from the $32 it charged in 2002, but still a screaming bargain, the equivalent of $16.25 per standard-size bottle. Especially because it's very good wine. Boldly fruity yet somehow still in balance, it's got blackberry, leather and dusty earth in spades. As big red wines go, it's refreshing and gulpable - exactly the sort of provision most of us would be thrilled to buy in bulk.
