Orin Swift 8 Years in the Desert Red Blend 2023

Dave’s first gig in wine came in 1997 as a harvest intern at Robert Mondavi. Fully infatuated with the industry from his year there, he decided to take a wildly unconventional route by immediately starting his own project the very next year, using only two tons of Zinfandel that he sourced and launched Orin Swift Cellars. The rest as they say is history.

The backstory for Orin Swift’s “8 Years in the Desert” is actually pretty funny and if you know Dave Phinney, very true to his rebellious character. The name is a play on the legal constraint that he faced after the immense success of his original, Zinfandel-based ‘The Prisoner’ wine. In 2008, when he sold The Prisoner brand, he signed an extensive non-compete agreement that explicitly barred him from making any Zinfandel wine for eight years. The name of the wine, “8 Years in the Desert,” is a direct and somewhat cheeky reference to this forced “exile” or “varietal purgatory” from the grape that first established his career. As soon as the non-compete expired, Phinney triumphantly returned to making a Zinfandel-focused blend, creating a new label with an eight-vintage run of unique, desert-themed labels to commemorate his return to the grape that started it all.