posted by admin on Nov 15
(Image courtesy of wine.appellationamerica.com)
Nobody needs me to say great things about Ridge Vineyards. It makes one of America’s greatest wines, Monte Bello. Yet when it comes to thinking about great American producers the focus always seems to fall on the cult wines, and rarely on a more accessible producer like Ridge.
Partly that’s a result of the law of scarcity, which roughly speaking says that we want most what we can’t have. Even if you’re willing to soar into the $1,000-a-bottle stratosphere, you might not be able to find some of the most in-demand wines. But anybody can buy a Ridge wine. It’s not hard to find Monte Bellos, and a zinfandel from Lytton Springs or Geyserville is generally as close as your nearest wine shop.
While such availability may lower Ridge’s status, it does nothing to detract from the greatness of the wines. I’m out on the Sonoma Coast today, but while I was in the Bay Area over the weekend I had an opportunity to taste some older Ridge wines, including three Monte Bellos from the 1970’s that did nothing to undercut that notion.
The tasting began with a couple of Monte Bello chardonnays, from 2004 and 1999, the first vintage the wine was made. Now, the Monte Bello vineyard is in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where Mount Eden makes one of California’s greatest chardonnays. When you taste these Ridge chardonnays, you can taste the richness, purity and energy of a Santa Cruz Mountains chardonnay, but to me they taste a little too much of toasty oak as well.
We then tasted four wines from the 1990’s. The first was a rarity, a 1993 Bridgehead mataro. This wine comes from mourvèdre grapes grown in an old vineyard in Contra Costa County, which was pulled out after the 1997 vintage. Mourvèdre, known as mataro in parts of southern France and monastrell in Spain, makes spicy, peppery red wines like the best reds from Provence. The ’93 was in a sort of autumnal phase. It still showed some spice but its fruit had evolved into a dry leaf kind of aroma that was still enjoyable, but maybe not for many more years.
Then came a 1994 York Creek petite sirah. Petite sirahs, which are anything but petite, can last forever though they don’t seem to evolve much. They are very tannic when young, and they certainly become more approachable. This one had all the sweet fruit of youth and was easy to drink. A 1996 syrah from the Lytton Springs vineyard followed, which was ripe and delicious, full of spicy fruit and still showing some structure. The last wine of the this flight, a ’99 Lytton Springs zinfandel, was absolutely delicious: subtle and complex with mulberry and spice flavors. This was a zin at its peak, and showed that though we tend to drink zinfandel young, a good zin can really imrove for 8 to 10 years.
The next series of wines included three Monte Bellos, from 1972, 1976 and 1978, and each was balanced and beautiful in its own way. The ’72 was complex and perfumed, with light fruit, mineral and earth flavors. The ’76 was maybe more exuberant and structured, while the ’78 was lithe and pure, graceful but maybe a little further along in its life than the other two. I doubt that any of these wines exceeded 12.5 percent alcohol, a shocking contrast to the over-ripe monsters of today that exceed 15 percent. Even recent Monte Bellos are in the 13 to 13.5 percent range. I doubt many of those bigger wines will age half as well.
Incidentally, I tasted that ’78 Monte Bello before, just a few years ago in the same Berkeley living room where we tasted these Ridge wines, when we did a modest re-enactment of the famous 1976 Paris tasting. Back then, the ’78 Monte Bello was my favorite of the four American wines we tasted. And, in a 30th anniversary re-enactment of the ’76 tasting in 2006, the ’71 Monte Bello was reckoned the No. 1 wine.
By the way, my wine-writing counterparts at The Wall Street Journal, Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, habitually recommend for Thanksgiving that you drink fine American cabernet sauvignons. As you can see from my column in today’s paper, I have a very different approach. That’s because my own Thanksgiving dinners tend to be for 25 to 35 people, and we’d go through far more good cabernet than I could afford. But, if I were to have a Thanksgiving dinner for four, I can’t think of a better wine than well-aged Monte Bello. As it was, these wines went beautifully with roasted leg of lamb and green beans with grilled persimmons.
Source: Greatness Within Reach
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