2008 Monte Bello

I tasted more wines than ever at Ridge this year. Not that I am complaining, as this collection is jam-packed with fabulous wines that will delight Ridge fans. Mild weather with no heat spikes created conditions for even ripening in 2018. As I have already written previously, 2018 is an absolutely magical vintage for Sonoma County. The 2018 Zinfandel and Zinfandel-based wines are off the charts gorgeous, with a level of purity I am not sure I have seen before. In the Santa Cruz Mountains, 2018 yielded wines that are gracious and silky, but also a bit restrained. Ridge’s 2017s are shaping up to be magnificent. It was a cold, wet year for much of the growing season. Whereas some regions in California struggled under the Labor Day heat spikes, Ridge really needed that final burst of heat to get ripe. The 2017s, the reds in particular, are breathtaking. Lastly, the 2019 Monte Bello is a wonderfully suggestive wine. Will all the 2019s be as compelling?

As the challenges of difficult growing seasons fade with time, two things happen. First, in the memory of winemakers, rain events magically become less extreme: the actual torrential rainfall that plagued a harvest shrinks to moderate precipitation and eventually to a vague recollection of moisture. Freakishly cool or brutally hot harvest weather or damaging hail storms are virtually forgotten, as the body has a short memory for pain. At the same time, as the wines themselves mature and are transformed, they reveal themselves to be less extreme after all, until at some point it can be next to impossible to find the insanity of the vintage in the bottle. I’ve seen these patterns play out again and again in temperate wine-growing areas like Bordeaux, Burgundy and northern Italy—and even in normally hot, bone-dry growing regions. Two thousand eight was such a year for California’s North Coast.

I tasted a breathtaking array of wines during my recent visit with Paul Draper at Ridge. Draper is a true American icon, so it's great to see him doing well after a bout with illness. I also tasted a number of older wines, including several Monte Bellos going back to the 1970s. Heretical as it may sound, I think the wines Draper is making today will prove to be far superior to the wines of decades past, many of which are rightly considered legendary. For ease of reference I have also included notes on all of the Ridge wines made outside the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Chardonnays are fermented with native yeasts and go into barrel with their gross lees, which are stirred once a week. The malos usually start the following spring. The wines are assembled just before the following harvest and go back into neutral oak. Aging is about 15 months for the Estate and 17 months for the Chardonnay Monte Bello, with a maximum of 25% new barrels. The reds are fermented with ambient yeasts, undergo malolactic fermentation in tank (except for the Monte Bello which is mostly done in barrel) and stay on their gross lees until the following spring.