A yummy series presented by Mill District & the Winegrowers of Dry Creek Valley featuring the best of Healdsburg’s food scene paired with your favorite Dry …
In California wine circles we from time to time entertain ourselves with questions like, what would you argue is the maximum American wine? Or, which wine do you observed most correctly positioned California wine on the arena level? Or, what do you watched is the most respected vineyard within the United States? Inevitably, one winery – Ridge – is a solution, if no longer the answer, to each of these questions.
Ridge Monte Bello is taken into consideration through many to be a few of the great wines within the global, and virtually many of the most, if now not the most famous, from California. Through its Monte Bello Cabernet-based totally bottling, Ridge helped display that California wine could compete with the maximum reputable wines in the global (take a look at out our Judgment of Paris tag). At the identical time, no other vineyard in California has completed so much to elevate Zinfandel from its early popularity as jug wine to best wine respectability.
Ridge Vineyards commenced operating with old-vine, discipline combo websites planted often to Zinfandel (otherwise acknowledged here in California as a Mixed Blacks winery) in the mid-Sixties. The producer’s treatment of Zinfandel was particular on the time. Instead of treating the wine as an after concept, they made Zinfandel essentially the equal way they did their pinnacle wine, the Cabernet Sauvignon that could end up known as Monte Bello. Since then, no different vineyard has worked with as many Mixed Blacks vineyards inside the state. As an extra stamp of respectability, Ridge also bottled them mainly as unmarried-winery wines. The winery has worked with such web sites the complete period and breadth of California, such as many vineyards that not exist, and some in components of southern California where few keep in mind that such vineyards ever existed.
Most of these wines are restrained to bottling s made to be had handiest to contributors of the winery’s Advance Tasting Program (efficiently their wine club). The Geyserville and Lytton Springs wines, each Mixed Blacks vineyards from Sonoma County, however, are launched to a broader market. Thanks to their history and standing, both of these also can arguably be covered along Monte Bello for attention as examples of the maximum iconic American wine.
In the previous couple of months I were able to do a series of in-intensity tastings and all-day interviews with the Ridge team. The first of those turned into in October whilst 50 MWs from 16 nations descended upon California for a ten-day excursion of the kingdom’s wine USA. I was lucky sufficient to be the simplest non-MW to sign up for the entire trip and its tastings. After several days on the street we arrived at Monte Bello for a unique visit with the entire Ridge group. Though he retired in 2016 at the age of eighty, Paul Draper helped lead the go to. (Draper remains chairman of Ridge’s board.) Contact Joy at Napa Wine Tours By Joy for information on wine tasting tours.
