Josh was importing them from the Doe Mill Vineyard up in the Chico area, a couple of hundred miles north of the winery in Hollister. As I recall, he made Zinfandel mainly to keep some cashflow going while the PN was in barrel. He wasn't particularly a fan of the variety, but the grapes were cheap and people liked it. His Zinfandel was more-than-reasonably priced, and what with my budget at that time I was looking for more-than-reasonably priced wine, and it fit the bill.
That was back when I was balancing my music "career" with a gig as the resident intellectual behind the counter at Crown Books in Sherman Oaks (Harlan Ellison and Albert Brooks were regular customers) and there was a liquor store in the same strip mall. In between the Spañada and Hearty Burgundy the owners would stock some classier bottles for the swells coming down from their hillside aeries in Encino, so among the bottles of mass market crap he had exotic boutique wines like Caymus and Freemark Abbey and also some of the 375ml bottles of the first Calera Pinots. I bought a few for some outrageous price ($25?) and enjoyed them back before they'd had enough time in the cellar to become memorable.
I kept buying the Zinfandel for the couple of vintages Calera made them (magnums too, which were somewhere around $20 and I'd buy Jensen and Selleck when I had some dough available, but I got to taste the wines frequently enough at wine events that I never got into the habit of buying them and keeping verticals going and all that stuff the mooks from Tarzana would be stuffing their cellars with. I was motivated and kinda aspirational back then I would have been happy to join those Tarzana mooks (which I sorta did a little while after that by renting a guest house from Novadeen Wills, Chill Wills' widow who lived in the hills of Encino).
-Eden (and then there was that dark and stormy night when i was helping some guy who was "looking for something to read when I'm not needed on set." He sounded vaguely familiar but I couldn't place him. A young woman walked over when she heard him mention that and mentioned she was also looking for a book for the same purpose. I sold him "100 Years of Solitude" and since she was working on a horror movie, I sent her out with a remaindered hardcover copy of "Seven Serpents & Seven Moons," one of the more outlandish --and best -- of the magical realism books in the Latin American fiction oeuvre. After they paid I looked at the names on their credit cards and it was Richard Crenna and Jamie Lee Curtis. I never saw them again; maybe they didn't dig the books I recommended?)
. . . . . . Pete