(WashingtonPost) - In the fall of 1976, a San Francisco medical laboratory scientist named Joel Peterson bought seven tons of zinfandel grapes. He made wine by hand, in open-top fermentation tanks, punching down the grapes with a makeshift tool he fashioned himself, using techniques he had learned while apprenticing with Joseph Swan, a noted Sonoma County winemaker. He ended up with 327 cases of wine.

That was the first vintage for Ravenswood winery, which would become one of California’s most influential and a major champion of the Golden State’s signature grape. Peterson was bucking a consumer tide: Zinfandel was known as “white zinfandel,” in fact a slightly sweet, mostly insipid pink wine that appealed to the sweet tooth of American soda drinkers (and gave rosé a bad reputation it has only recently overcome). Peterson and his business partner, W. Reed Foster, coined the slogan “No Wimpy Wines!” to counter the white zinfandel image and promote his wines as robust expressions of California’s climate and terroir.

This is a banner year for California wine anniversaries. The Robert Mondavi Winery turned 50 in July, and in May the winners of the 1976 Judgment of Paris wine tasting celebrated four decades of the marketing event that keeps on giving. Amid that hoopla, Peterson has been relatively low-key in marking his own milestone. But he took a break last week from shoveling grape skins and stems from fermentation tanks at Ravenswood’s winery near the town of Sonoma to reminisce in a phone interview.