celebrating 50 Years

A Retrospective Tasting

Photo Gallery

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By Jancis Robinson, March 13, 2010
Excerpt from Ridge - a California Exception

A small group of wine writers and wine merchants gathered in California last week to celebrate Ridge's half-century and Draper's 40 years on the ridge (where he lives). These anniversaries are approximate.  It was in 1959 that Ridge's wooden barns and ancient vines began to be recuperated by a a small group of Stanford scientists who decided to indulge in low-tech winemaking as a weekend hobby. By the 1960s they were producing small amounts of highly ambitious wine and at the end of the decade decided to hire a full-time winemaker, inspired by a trial lot of wine Draper had made while working for the Peace Corps in Chile. The still robust Monte Bello 1970 was Draper's first solo vintage. The more fragile 1971 performed well at the famous Judgment of Paris France versus California tasting in 1976 and was the overall favourite in the re-run 30 years later.

Since 1986 Ridge has been owned by the Japanese pharmaceutical company Otsuka but you certainly wouldn't know it. The Ridge team is still more like a group of inspired academics than anything remotely corporate. Formal oenological training is eschewed. Draper claims that his wine training was tasting the great wines of Europe and remains suspicious of anyone inculcated with winemaking orthodoxy.  "We have to retrain anyone who arrives with an oenology degree'', he maintains.  Current winemaker Eric Baugher is a microbiologist who came to Ridge in 1994 via a graduate project in its surprisingly high-tech lab. At Ridge, wine is made by blind tasting, tasting and tasting again.

When we arrived at Ridge for the celebrations, our first task was to taste two samples of the 2008 Monte Bello blind and decide whether the one with an additional 9/10 of one per cent of first press wine was superior to the sample without. That night, with a fine though non-flashy dinner at Marche in nearby Menlo Park, we sipped a dozen vintages of Monte Bello back to 1968, the only wine of the lot that was less than magnificent. 

The following day we moved en masse to Sonoma, centre of operations for Ridge's other great speciality: old-vine Zinfandel, as shown in one of the Lytton vineyards above.  Above, we are enjoying lots of different 208s with lunch at Lytton Springs winery (where the rather puzzling picture below was taken, Draper halfway down the table on the right). Typically, when it was discovered that this variety, long associated with California, had its origins in Croatia, Ridge's head viticulturist David Gates, who has been at Ridge since 1989, went there to see for himself. 

Most California Zinfandel is massively proportioned, with flavours ranging from jammy through berries to porty.  But Ridge's single-vineyard Zins are unusually restrained, structured, refined and complex.  Again over dinner, at the Healdsburg Hotel's Dry Creek Kitchen this time, we tasted a dozen Ridge Zinfandels back to a Lytton Springs 1973, the only wine over the whole two days that seemed to show any sign of age. Zin needs higher alcohols to show its character but, in contrast to the current California norm, most of these wines were  in the 14-15% range.

In the bowels of the Monte Bello winery, goatee'd, 74-year-old Draper had told us portentously, 'high alcohol is the choice of the proprietor. It is not dictated by global warming'  It is probably just as well that he lives in such relative isolation.

 

An Overview of Ridge

The 1892 Monte Bello was the first vintage from vines planted in 1886. The climate was too cool to consistently ripen zinfandel, the dominant California varietal of that day, so the grapes were principally the Bordeaux varietals. The vines and their deep roots have been transforming the fractured limestone sub-soils of Monte Bello Ridge for nearly a hundred and twenty years. The last of the original vineyards was abandoned in the early 1940s; a limited number were re-planted in 1949. Those cabernet sauvignon vines produced the first Ridge Monte Bello in 1959. We began re-planting more of the old blocks in the 1960s, but not until the mid-seventies were those vines mature enough to be included. Over the years, we have been able to lease or purchase a number of the remaining nineteenth-century parcels and continue re-planting.
            Our appellation, Santa Cruz Mountains, is cut in two by the San Andreas fault. The climate of the eastern segment, on the North American plate, where the Monte Bello vineyards are located, is influenced primarily by San Francisco Bay. The western one, on the Pacific plate, is influenced by the Pacific Ocean. Though both are cool, the eastern is above the Bay's inversion layer, and warm enough to ripen the Bordeaux varietals. Monte Bello's higher vineyards (2000' - 2700') are within sight of the ocean fifteen miles to the west, and - to a degree - influenced by it. The western segment of the Santa Cruz Mountains, however, is deeply affected by the ocean's summer fogs; it has proved most suited to pinot noir and chardonnay.
            We made our first Geyserville Zinfandel in 1966, from vines planted in 1882 on the gravelly western edge of Alexander Valley. In 1990, we took control of that vineyard, replanting non-zinfandel blocks to their original zinfandel and its nineteenth-century complementary varietals. Our first Lytton Springs Zinfandel was the 1972, from vines planted in 1902 on the benchland of Dry Creek Valley. In 1990, we purchased the eastern Lytton Springs vineyard, which includes the oldest vines; in 1995, we purchased the rest of the original Lytton vineyard, just to the west.
            Ridge traces its lineage to the San Francisco physician Osea Perrone, who established the Monte Bello vineyard and winery, and to Emmett Rixford, who planted the nearby La Cuesta vineyard. In 1883, Rixford published a book describing the growing and winemaking techniques he and Perrone followed in making some of the finest wines of their day. Those traditional practices, and those described by Rixford's mentor Raimond Boireau (Two volumes, pub. Bordeaux, 1876/7) form the basis of the approach we have followed for fifty years. Within the bounds of these practices, we continue to refine our approach through experience, and our ever-deepening understanding of terroir. Our viticulture is sustainable and organic. From the beginning, we have kept all vineyards separate, seeking those sites that show distinct, individual character and quality. In the cellar, we avoid additions other than minimal effective SO2. Both primary and secondary fermentations are natural. There is no mechanical processing except for gentle filtration at bottling.
            Our principal wines are from the Monte Bello, Geyserville, and Lytton Springs vineyards. We work regularly with nine smaller vineyards as well.
            In replanting Monte Bello, our main source of cabernet has been a selection massal originally from Rixford's La Cuesta vineyard. That selection came from the commune of Margaux in the early 1880s. (Unsubstantiated reports name the source as Chateau Margaux, which Rixford greatly admired.)
            We consider ourselves caretakers of the land. We own most of our vineyards, hold long-term leases on others, and have agricultural easements in perpetuity. We collaborate with the Regional Open Space District - maintaining the original vineyard land as they preserve the wild space - assuring the land will be kept free of future development.
                                                                                                           
Paul Draper
Monte Bello Ridge, 2010