Verticals (2019) s01e06 Episode Script
Ridge
(chiming instrumental music)
- Yeah, you're right, sorry.
Hi, love.
- [Woman On Phone] Oh, hi hon.
does the insurance need to be bought
within a certain number of days?
- We're gonna buy it this week,
so this is travel insurance.
So, we'll do it this week
but, I can't do it now.
We're just talking now, so
I'll give you a call back.
if you need it.
- [Woman On Phone] Okay.
- Okay?
- [Woman On Phone] Sounds good, bye-bye.
- Yeah, we're going up to Canada
and she wanted us to
have travel insurance.
So we're back to.
(dramatic orchestral music)
- Ridge is located in
the Santa Cruz mountains,
which is an amazing place
to grow and make wine,
but it's also not the
center of the radar screen
for most wine people.
- Ridge is nowhere near anything else,
but they've been making
wine since the late 60's,
and they are an icon in the business,
and especially their
Montebello cabernet sauvignon.
- Specifically Montebello
is an american first growth,
it just is, and the wines
are really, really important
to the history of California wine.
(soft instrumental music)
- 1885, an Italian doctor
came to San Francisco,
wanted to grow vines.
As a doctor, he wanted to make wine,
and he looked around at various regions.
The Santa Cruz mountains was
just starting to be developed.
But there was this area, which
I think, to his surprise,
was called the Montebello district,
and in '86 he began to build this winery,
and to plant the vineyards around it.
- It's an amazing property.
I mean, it keeps you
totally intrigued of just
what this piece of ground
can do every single year.
- You've gotta realize this is rocky soil,
this is a limestone Ridge,
something that's very rare in California.
There's no limestone in Sonoma or in Napa.
This is an unusual place to grow grapes.
As far as we know, his
first Montebello vintage
was either 1891, 1892, and he
continued to produce until,
or the winery did, until
1920, when, of course,
prohibition brought a stop to everything.
His nephew carried it
on after prohibition,
reopened it in '33.
The vines were replanted
in '49, the cabernet,
and a little bit of chardonnay.
Our first vintage then was '62,
with an incredible vintage
of Montebello in that year.
- It's been producing great
wine for over 100 years,
and that Ridge has been on this mountain
60 years of that time.
We get these MBA students
coming up from Stanford
or Santa Clara University
to study the Ridge model,
and they're like "Wow, I mean,
"how are you still in business?"
- Ridge really enriches the conversation
about California wine
and it really trips up
some people's preconceived notions, right?
Like even people that I meet that say,
"I don't like California cabernet."
But they make exceptions for Ridge, right?
or, "I don't like
american oak in my wines."
But they make exception for Ridge.
Or, "I don't think that California wines
"age particularly well, except for Ridge."
- So the '71 Montebello
became far more famous
than we'd initially expected.
(soft classical music)
Steven Spurrier, the English wine writer,
and now grower and sparkling
wine maker in the UK,
had a small retail shop
in Paris, La Madeleine.
And, he also had connected with
it, a little tasting school
for mainly Americans working in Paris,
and some Brits working in Paris,
who wanted to learn more about wine.
And he decided, as the bicentennial
of the American Revolution
came around in '76,
that he would do a celebration
with California wines.
And he decided that he could get a bunch
of top french tasters, wine
makers, principally, journalist,
one top journalist, so on,
to come to the Madeleine,
and taste California wines
as part of this celebration.
The Judgment of Paris.
- I think the Judgment of Paris
was a very important event,
because California wines won, right?
and it was a qualitative seal
of approval from french judges.
It couldn't have possibly been better
outcome for the California wine industry.
- You've got to understand
that in that day and age,
there were about four
small California wineries
that were attempting to
make really fine cabernet.
Three or four were from
Napa, and Ridge was down here
in the Santa Cruz
mountains, and that was it.
And what Steven wanted to do
was to focus on the small guys
that were just really coming up.
He came to visit us, tasted the wines,
explained that he had
this celebratory tasting
of California cabernets coming up.
The next year Patricia Gallagher,
his assistant, came and
picked up the wines.
I was expecting that we
would put in the 1970,
which was this more
structured, bigger wine.
I wasn't here, she picked up
the current release, which was the '71.
And afterwards, I said "Oh my
god, that's really too bad.
"The '70 would have stood up
to the others even better."
- The '71 Montebello is super important,
if for no other reason, because it was
the Judgment of Paris wine.
And it's one of those wines
that put America on the map
as being able to make world class wine.
- The Ridge came in 5th, it came in,
I think ahead of one of the first growths,
but right in the middle
of the 10 wine tasting.
- Yeah, 1971 is by far one of the most
rare vintages of Montebello.
I mean, there was not
much made in that time,
it was only a handful of barrels,
which would equate to just a hand,
yeah probably a couple
hundred cases of wine.
- You know, we're down to, I don't know,
something like half a
case, maybe a little more.
We've got a 50 year old
wine, California Cabernet,
this is special to me, and I
love to see how it's showing.
Great, and, the cork is,
in fact, in 50 years,
soaked all the way through.
Normally, I decant with some
light, but you could say
that it really doesn't make
a great deal of difference,
because of the major
sediment that we've got.
Okay.
The wine smells great, so we'll see.
So with 50 years when my french friends
thought that in about
10 it would have faded.
We'll see how this '71 is.
Boy that nose hasn't hasn't
oxidized or maderized.
Still beautiful, it's
going to actually open up
in the decanter, because it
was, the seal was really good.
Layered, full bodied,
there's still fruit there,
it's just astounding.
From the beginning, the '71
was so beautifully balanced,
that that gave it the chance
to age the way it's aged.
The wine, as young as it is,
has come together to the degree
that you can really see that balance,
that it's not excessively tannic.
The elements have begun to come together,
you're going to have this chance of a wine
that will age a long time.
So 50 year old cabernet from California,
the '71 is a great example.
- In a business where there
are a lot of blowhards,
and a lot of people who are constantly
tooting their own horn, Paul
has been such a quiet voice.
And it's sometimes the people
with the quietest voices
that have the most to say,
and Paul's one of those.
He's a noble guy.
- He just exudes kind of
scholarship, and expertise,
and patience, and experience.
And he really is a really important figure
in the California wine industry.
He's a leader.
- One of the things I love
about the way he makes wine,
is he makes wine in his head, I think.
He's very cerebral about his wine making.
(Paul laughs)
- Yeah, the uncertainties of wine making.
Certainly weather is the main thing.
We're in the hands of mother nature
in terms of the quality and the quantity
of the wine we're going to get,
the grapes we're gonna
get, to make that wine.
Then, of course, you get into wine making
and so all of those things come in.
And how you deal with them to
make the most balanced wine,
you obviously become more
and more experienced.
Now with '78, which was a warm year.
I mean, actually, particularly
warm, a lot of fermentations
throughout California
stuck because of the heat,
and the way the fermentations went.
Up here it was cool enough
that it was no problem.
We had a full bodied wine,
everything looked great.
And in those days we
didn't have the advanced
analytical equipment in the
lab, that wasn't available
for measuring the secondary
fermentation, the malolactic.
- Malolactic fermentation
is a secondary fermentation,
it's a fermentation that
happens typically at the end of,
or after the primary alcohol fermentation,
which is where you have
yeast eating sugar,
and turning it into alcohol and CO2.
- And in '78, unbeknownst to
us, we racked off the lee,
the malolactic lee, the gross lee,
before the malolactic was totally done.
- Lee is all the yeasts
that have fermented,
the sweet juice over about
a five month period of time,
the yeasts are slowly
working through the sugar,
they multiply, they
form a large population,
a large mass, that will actually.
Once they finish and ferment dry,
there's no more food to survive
on, so all of that material,
all the yeast will settle to the bottom
of the barrel, and form this nice.
Not a fancy word is a sludge
layer, of all the dead yeast.
- We thought is was,
and we went to barrel,
aged the wine out.
Actually, in those days
we were going, what?
A full two years, so we
bottled at 24 months.
- [Wine Maker] It's going
through a fermentation
in the bottle, and that's a problem.
You get gas, you get some sediment,
you get some other things.
- We were releasing the wine,
and had actually made our first
release, and in some cases,
because we were already
selling some futures in Europe,
the wine was really out there.
We still had about half the release to go,
or a quarter at least.
- That's a problem.
From a commercial
standpoint, it's a problem,
because you have a wine that
could possibly get out there
into the marketplace that's not clean,
doesn't look good in the bottle.
You open the bottle and you pour it,
and it's got funky stuff in it.
- And of course, you
know, you can imagine with
what you're expecting
from a great aging wine,
and you pick up this
glass, and it's spritzy.
(laughs)
That is not what your
customers want to see,
not what we want to see.
And so, what we did, we
recalled all we could,
we dumped out every single bottle,
put it back in the small bottling tank.
And within, oh, I'd say two
weeks, less than two weeks,
the malolactic was completely
done, the wine was still,
and we re bottled, which
is what's in this bottle.
But, having done that, we said "Oh my god,
"that wine is never going
to be of any interest."
So we kind of put that reserve aside,
which is one reason we're
having a bottle today,
because we had that reserve for years.
And about, oh I'd say about 10 years out,
we opened a bottle, and it
was absolutely glorious,
and no oxidation showing.
And as it aged, it kept that freshness.
And so I'm hoping today as we open this,
that it's still showing that.
Anyway, that's the background on something
that we thought had totally
failed, and in fact,
because it was still in
malolactic, and releasing CO2,
which were those bubbles, it stayed fresh.
These lead capsules from the
old days are much tougher
than what these little
capsulers are willing to do.
So, we'll see if I can get this thing off.
Now it's going to be a job, there we go.
We would normally decant, single
decant, something this old,
color looks great.
Oh, it smells great.
Fresh still, no sign of oxidation,
just absolutely what we
would ideally look for.
Having the chance to work
with the quality of grapes
that we had here at Montebello,
totally convinced me that
what I had dreamed of
all those years that really,
it was what I wanted to do.
It was my vocation for life.
I don't think I thought
about the fact that
more than 50 years later, I'd
still be at Ridge doing this,
except to say that I knew
I was doing what I loved.
And by, I'd say by '72,
or at most, '72 or '73,
I knew that I would be doing it at Ridge.
That is that this is really
the place where I wanted to be.
(gentle instrumental music)
I met Maureen in '73, '74,
and decided "My god, this
is somebody I want to spend
"the rest of my life with."
And we were married in '75.
And so, I was newly married.
Our daughter was not born until '79,
but it was a wonderful period in my life,
bringing my daughter in a
snuggly to work every morning
in order to give my wife a break to relax,
and not have to be on top of it.
Luckily, Maureen didn't
realize, although she did later,
that I was climbing up the catwalks,
and we would be moving a tank.
And here's the baby, and I'm
in there with the other guys
pushing this tank, and if
she had seen me in action
in the winery she would have
just, you know, at the time,
gone "Oh my god," as I go up ladders.
Because I didn't change anything
just because I had this
little baby on my chest.
(soft piano music)
We're on Montebello Ridge,
actually, we're standing
at over 800 meters up here
in the Santa Cruz mountains,
we're looking out over the pacific.
If that cloud weren't there,
that marine haze and cloud,
you could see ships
going by on a clear day.
When I was offered the job of wine maker
here in 1968, I tasted the '62 and '64,
and said "My god, these can stand up
"to an excellent year in Bordeau."
And it's got to be this limestone soil,
and this cool climate.
And if I join these guys,
I'm gonna have the chance
to make some really good wine,
because the vineyard is
going to make it for me."
And it's exactly what we've
seen go with Montebello,
right through the years,
from that '62 until the current vintages.
The reason that I chose '97
as really a key vintage,
in a way, not so much for
Ridge, but for California.
Let's put it this way, we all know
that in the '80's and into
the '90's, grapes were picked,
and in this case cabernet was
picked at a lower sugar level.
And the wines were in
not as ripe a style as
what we see today.
What happened in '97 was
we had a full crop set,
which was wonderful for everyone,
and we had great weather,
and what we have virtually
never seen to this degree,
since, at least, we
haven't here at Montebello,
was that as the harvest began,
all of the blocks were ripening equally.
Usually up here at this
elevation, these come in late,
and we've got, as we go down the mountain,
we have this variation
in when the grapes ripen.
And so we're given time
to pick the ripest grapes,
usually from the lower elevations,
and finish their fermentations,
have the tanks free,
and can continue picking.
What happened in '97, to us,
and generally, to just about
all the rest of the cabernet
makers up in Napa and Sonoma,
as well as here, was that
the grapes ripened in
all these blocks at the same moment.
Here, we were incredibly lucky,
we're on the natural yeast,
and for whatever reason,
the fermentations went very quickly.
By the time we filled
all of our fermenters,
the first ones we had
filled were finished,
and we could press off and keep picking.
What happened in general in California
is that the fermentations
went at a normal,
slower pace, and so you
filled your fermenters
and you had to stop picking.
And, while you stopped,
the grapes which were already
ripe were getting riper.
My friends in Napa that
talked to me about this
said they were really concerned about
what their clients were gonna say,
because it was such a
major shift in style.
Probably the biggest shift in style
that we've seen in California,
certainly in my memory.
And, they were also very worried about
the principle American critic, Bob Parker,
and what was he going to say?
And the great thing, even
before their customers saw it,
was that Bob Parker had
a bottle of the '97,
a number of bottles from
all over Napa, and said,
"This is great, I love
this richer, riper style,
"you guys should keep
doing this every year.
"This is, this is what you're all about."
And that's where we are today.
So for us, in a sense, the
world continued as always
at this moderate level of ripeness.
But the '97 for us is a beautiful vintage,
it's still in its youth,
it's still aging beautifully.
So, I'll open this,
we'll see if it's as good
as I'm claiming it to be.
(slow instrumental music)
Oh, good, and this is just
barely, like a quarter,
not even a quarter inch into the cork.
So as far as the cork, it's
gonna go for a long ways.
I was hearing the other day that
with wine we have the visual,
and we have the taste.
And one reason that we clink glasses,
is that we also need the sound.
(laughs)
I like that, hitting the
glass with the bottle
was just what we needed to complete it.
Oh, boy.
It's young wine, the
tannins are resolving,
but by no means resolved.
Full bodied, layered, it's
the kind of complexity
that we look for in the Montebello.
Stylistically, I personally
have a preference
for these wines that are this complex,
and yet are not higher in ripeness.
And the reason is that as you go into
really overripe grapes, you
get nothing but a black fruit,
and it's not as complex as when you have
both the red fruit and the black fruit
interacting in the wine.
We've always made the
wines that we prefer.
We've been so lucky in
that we've never had
to look at the market and
say "What do they want?
"What is it we should be making
"if we're going to be successful?"
We've always been able to make the wines
that we wanted to make,
and that we thought
were the best wines.
And by some miracle,
(laughs) our public said,
"Yeah these are pretty
good, we'll buy them."
And they've allowed us to continue to do,
what we want to do in the first place.
I gotta drink some more of this.
- [Man Offscreen] Why
don't we talk for a second
about white zinfandel?
- [Paul] (laughs) Okay.
- [Mann Offscreen] Let's talk about it.
- [Paul] Great.
(gentle orchestral music)
- Yeah, you're right, sorry.
Hi, love.
- [Woman On Phone] Oh, hi hon.
does the insurance need to be bought
within a certain number of days?
- We're gonna buy it this week,
so this is travel insurance.
So, we'll do it this week
but, I can't do it now.
We're just talking now, so
I'll give you a call back.
if you need it.
- [Woman On Phone] Okay.
- Okay?
- [Woman On Phone] Sounds good, bye-bye.
- Yeah, we're going up to Canada
and she wanted us to
have travel insurance.
So we're back to.
(dramatic orchestral music)
- Ridge is located in
the Santa Cruz mountains,
which is an amazing place
to grow and make wine,
but it's also not the
center of the radar screen
for most wine people.
- Ridge is nowhere near anything else,
but they've been making
wine since the late 60's,
and they are an icon in the business,
and especially their
Montebello cabernet sauvignon.
- Specifically Montebello
is an american first growth,
it just is, and the wines
are really, really important
to the history of California wine.
(soft instrumental music)
- 1885, an Italian doctor
came to San Francisco,
wanted to grow vines.
As a doctor, he wanted to make wine,
and he looked around at various regions.
The Santa Cruz mountains was
just starting to be developed.
But there was this area, which
I think, to his surprise,
was called the Montebello district,
and in '86 he began to build this winery,
and to plant the vineyards around it.
- It's an amazing property.
I mean, it keeps you
totally intrigued of just
what this piece of ground
can do every single year.
- You've gotta realize this is rocky soil,
this is a limestone Ridge,
something that's very rare in California.
There's no limestone in Sonoma or in Napa.
This is an unusual place to grow grapes.
As far as we know, his
first Montebello vintage
was either 1891, 1892, and he
continued to produce until,
or the winery did, until
1920, when, of course,
prohibition brought a stop to everything.
His nephew carried it
on after prohibition,
reopened it in '33.
The vines were replanted
in '49, the cabernet,
and a little bit of chardonnay.
Our first vintage then was '62,
with an incredible vintage
of Montebello in that year.
- It's been producing great
wine for over 100 years,
and that Ridge has been on this mountain
60 years of that time.
We get these MBA students
coming up from Stanford
or Santa Clara University
to study the Ridge model,
and they're like "Wow, I mean,
"how are you still in business?"
- Ridge really enriches the conversation
about California wine
and it really trips up
some people's preconceived notions, right?
Like even people that I meet that say,
"I don't like California cabernet."
But they make exceptions for Ridge, right?
or, "I don't like
american oak in my wines."
But they make exception for Ridge.
Or, "I don't think that California wines
"age particularly well, except for Ridge."
- So the '71 Montebello
became far more famous
than we'd initially expected.
(soft classical music)
Steven Spurrier, the English wine writer,
and now grower and sparkling
wine maker in the UK,
had a small retail shop
in Paris, La Madeleine.
And, he also had connected with
it, a little tasting school
for mainly Americans working in Paris,
and some Brits working in Paris,
who wanted to learn more about wine.
And he decided, as the bicentennial
of the American Revolution
came around in '76,
that he would do a celebration
with California wines.
And he decided that he could get a bunch
of top french tasters, wine
makers, principally, journalist,
one top journalist, so on,
to come to the Madeleine,
and taste California wines
as part of this celebration.
The Judgment of Paris.
- I think the Judgment of Paris
was a very important event,
because California wines won, right?
and it was a qualitative seal
of approval from french judges.
It couldn't have possibly been better
outcome for the California wine industry.
- You've got to understand
that in that day and age,
there were about four
small California wineries
that were attempting to
make really fine cabernet.
Three or four were from
Napa, and Ridge was down here
in the Santa Cruz
mountains, and that was it.
And what Steven wanted to do
was to focus on the small guys
that were just really coming up.
He came to visit us, tasted the wines,
explained that he had
this celebratory tasting
of California cabernets coming up.
The next year Patricia Gallagher,
his assistant, came and
picked up the wines.
I was expecting that we
would put in the 1970,
which was this more
structured, bigger wine.
I wasn't here, she picked up
the current release, which was the '71.
And afterwards, I said "Oh my
god, that's really too bad.
"The '70 would have stood up
to the others even better."
- The '71 Montebello is super important,
if for no other reason, because it was
the Judgment of Paris wine.
And it's one of those wines
that put America on the map
as being able to make world class wine.
- The Ridge came in 5th, it came in,
I think ahead of one of the first growths,
but right in the middle
of the 10 wine tasting.
- Yeah, 1971 is by far one of the most
rare vintages of Montebello.
I mean, there was not
much made in that time,
it was only a handful of barrels,
which would equate to just a hand,
yeah probably a couple
hundred cases of wine.
- You know, we're down to, I don't know,
something like half a
case, maybe a little more.
We've got a 50 year old
wine, California Cabernet,
this is special to me, and I
love to see how it's showing.
Great, and, the cork is,
in fact, in 50 years,
soaked all the way through.
Normally, I decant with some
light, but you could say
that it really doesn't make
a great deal of difference,
because of the major
sediment that we've got.
Okay.
The wine smells great, so we'll see.
So with 50 years when my french friends
thought that in about
10 it would have faded.
We'll see how this '71 is.
Boy that nose hasn't hasn't
oxidized or maderized.
Still beautiful, it's
going to actually open up
in the decanter, because it
was, the seal was really good.
Layered, full bodied,
there's still fruit there,
it's just astounding.
From the beginning, the '71
was so beautifully balanced,
that that gave it the chance
to age the way it's aged.
The wine, as young as it is,
has come together to the degree
that you can really see that balance,
that it's not excessively tannic.
The elements have begun to come together,
you're going to have this chance of a wine
that will age a long time.
So 50 year old cabernet from California,
the '71 is a great example.
- In a business where there
are a lot of blowhards,
and a lot of people who are constantly
tooting their own horn, Paul
has been such a quiet voice.
And it's sometimes the people
with the quietest voices
that have the most to say,
and Paul's one of those.
He's a noble guy.
- He just exudes kind of
scholarship, and expertise,
and patience, and experience.
And he really is a really important figure
in the California wine industry.
He's a leader.
- One of the things I love
about the way he makes wine,
is he makes wine in his head, I think.
He's very cerebral about his wine making.
(Paul laughs)
- Yeah, the uncertainties of wine making.
Certainly weather is the main thing.
We're in the hands of mother nature
in terms of the quality and the quantity
of the wine we're going to get,
the grapes we're gonna
get, to make that wine.
Then, of course, you get into wine making
and so all of those things come in.
And how you deal with them to
make the most balanced wine,
you obviously become more
and more experienced.
Now with '78, which was a warm year.
I mean, actually, particularly
warm, a lot of fermentations
throughout California
stuck because of the heat,
and the way the fermentations went.
Up here it was cool enough
that it was no problem.
We had a full bodied wine,
everything looked great.
And in those days we
didn't have the advanced
analytical equipment in the
lab, that wasn't available
for measuring the secondary
fermentation, the malolactic.
- Malolactic fermentation
is a secondary fermentation,
it's a fermentation that
happens typically at the end of,
or after the primary alcohol fermentation,
which is where you have
yeast eating sugar,
and turning it into alcohol and CO2.
- And in '78, unbeknownst to
us, we racked off the lee,
the malolactic lee, the gross lee,
before the malolactic was totally done.
- Lee is all the yeasts
that have fermented,
the sweet juice over about
a five month period of time,
the yeasts are slowly
working through the sugar,
they multiply, they
form a large population,
a large mass, that will actually.
Once they finish and ferment dry,
there's no more food to survive
on, so all of that material,
all the yeast will settle to the bottom
of the barrel, and form this nice.
Not a fancy word is a sludge
layer, of all the dead yeast.
- We thought is was,
and we went to barrel,
aged the wine out.
Actually, in those days
we were going, what?
A full two years, so we
bottled at 24 months.
- [Wine Maker] It's going
through a fermentation
in the bottle, and that's a problem.
You get gas, you get some sediment,
you get some other things.
- We were releasing the wine,
and had actually made our first
release, and in some cases,
because we were already
selling some futures in Europe,
the wine was really out there.
We still had about half the release to go,
or a quarter at least.
- That's a problem.
From a commercial
standpoint, it's a problem,
because you have a wine that
could possibly get out there
into the marketplace that's not clean,
doesn't look good in the bottle.
You open the bottle and you pour it,
and it's got funky stuff in it.
- And of course, you
know, you can imagine with
what you're expecting
from a great aging wine,
and you pick up this
glass, and it's spritzy.
(laughs)
That is not what your
customers want to see,
not what we want to see.
And so, what we did, we
recalled all we could,
we dumped out every single bottle,
put it back in the small bottling tank.
And within, oh, I'd say two
weeks, less than two weeks,
the malolactic was completely
done, the wine was still,
and we re bottled, which
is what's in this bottle.
But, having done that, we said "Oh my god,
"that wine is never going
to be of any interest."
So we kind of put that reserve aside,
which is one reason we're
having a bottle today,
because we had that reserve for years.
And about, oh I'd say about 10 years out,
we opened a bottle, and it
was absolutely glorious,
and no oxidation showing.
And as it aged, it kept that freshness.
And so I'm hoping today as we open this,
that it's still showing that.
Anyway, that's the background on something
that we thought had totally
failed, and in fact,
because it was still in
malolactic, and releasing CO2,
which were those bubbles, it stayed fresh.
These lead capsules from the
old days are much tougher
than what these little
capsulers are willing to do.
So, we'll see if I can get this thing off.
Now it's going to be a job, there we go.
We would normally decant, single
decant, something this old,
color looks great.
Oh, it smells great.
Fresh still, no sign of oxidation,
just absolutely what we
would ideally look for.
Having the chance to work
with the quality of grapes
that we had here at Montebello,
totally convinced me that
what I had dreamed of
all those years that really,
it was what I wanted to do.
It was my vocation for life.
I don't think I thought
about the fact that
more than 50 years later, I'd
still be at Ridge doing this,
except to say that I knew
I was doing what I loved.
And by, I'd say by '72,
or at most, '72 or '73,
I knew that I would be doing it at Ridge.
That is that this is really
the place where I wanted to be.
(gentle instrumental music)
I met Maureen in '73, '74,
and decided "My god, this
is somebody I want to spend
"the rest of my life with."
And we were married in '75.
And so, I was newly married.
Our daughter was not born until '79,
but it was a wonderful period in my life,
bringing my daughter in a
snuggly to work every morning
in order to give my wife a break to relax,
and not have to be on top of it.
Luckily, Maureen didn't
realize, although she did later,
that I was climbing up the catwalks,
and we would be moving a tank.
And here's the baby, and I'm
in there with the other guys
pushing this tank, and if
she had seen me in action
in the winery she would have
just, you know, at the time,
gone "Oh my god," as I go up ladders.
Because I didn't change anything
just because I had this
little baby on my chest.
(soft piano music)
We're on Montebello Ridge,
actually, we're standing
at over 800 meters up here
in the Santa Cruz mountains,
we're looking out over the pacific.
If that cloud weren't there,
that marine haze and cloud,
you could see ships
going by on a clear day.
When I was offered the job of wine maker
here in 1968, I tasted the '62 and '64,
and said "My god, these can stand up
"to an excellent year in Bordeau."
And it's got to be this limestone soil,
and this cool climate.
And if I join these guys,
I'm gonna have the chance
to make some really good wine,
because the vineyard is
going to make it for me."
And it's exactly what we've
seen go with Montebello,
right through the years,
from that '62 until the current vintages.
The reason that I chose '97
as really a key vintage,
in a way, not so much for
Ridge, but for California.
Let's put it this way, we all know
that in the '80's and into
the '90's, grapes were picked,
and in this case cabernet was
picked at a lower sugar level.
And the wines were in
not as ripe a style as
what we see today.
What happened in '97 was
we had a full crop set,
which was wonderful for everyone,
and we had great weather,
and what we have virtually
never seen to this degree,
since, at least, we
haven't here at Montebello,
was that as the harvest began,
all of the blocks were ripening equally.
Usually up here at this
elevation, these come in late,
and we've got, as we go down the mountain,
we have this variation
in when the grapes ripen.
And so we're given time
to pick the ripest grapes,
usually from the lower elevations,
and finish their fermentations,
have the tanks free,
and can continue picking.
What happened in '97, to us,
and generally, to just about
all the rest of the cabernet
makers up in Napa and Sonoma,
as well as here, was that
the grapes ripened in
all these blocks at the same moment.
Here, we were incredibly lucky,
we're on the natural yeast,
and for whatever reason,
the fermentations went very quickly.
By the time we filled
all of our fermenters,
the first ones we had
filled were finished,
and we could press off and keep picking.
What happened in general in California
is that the fermentations
went at a normal,
slower pace, and so you
filled your fermenters
and you had to stop picking.
And, while you stopped,
the grapes which were already
ripe were getting riper.
My friends in Napa that
talked to me about this
said they were really concerned about
what their clients were gonna say,
because it was such a
major shift in style.
Probably the biggest shift in style
that we've seen in California,
certainly in my memory.
And, they were also very worried about
the principle American critic, Bob Parker,
and what was he going to say?
And the great thing, even
before their customers saw it,
was that Bob Parker had
a bottle of the '97,
a number of bottles from
all over Napa, and said,
"This is great, I love
this richer, riper style,
"you guys should keep
doing this every year.
"This is, this is what you're all about."
And that's where we are today.
So for us, in a sense, the
world continued as always
at this moderate level of ripeness.
But the '97 for us is a beautiful vintage,
it's still in its youth,
it's still aging beautifully.
So, I'll open this,
we'll see if it's as good
as I'm claiming it to be.
(slow instrumental music)
Oh, good, and this is just
barely, like a quarter,
not even a quarter inch into the cork.
So as far as the cork, it's
gonna go for a long ways.
I was hearing the other day that
with wine we have the visual,
and we have the taste.
And one reason that we clink glasses,
is that we also need the sound.
(laughs)
I like that, hitting the
glass with the bottle
was just what we needed to complete it.
Oh, boy.
It's young wine, the
tannins are resolving,
but by no means resolved.
Full bodied, layered, it's
the kind of complexity
that we look for in the Montebello.
Stylistically, I personally
have a preference
for these wines that are this complex,
and yet are not higher in ripeness.
And the reason is that as you go into
really overripe grapes, you
get nothing but a black fruit,
and it's not as complex as when you have
both the red fruit and the black fruit
interacting in the wine.
We've always made the
wines that we prefer.
We've been so lucky in
that we've never had
to look at the market and
say "What do they want?
"What is it we should be making
"if we're going to be successful?"
We've always been able to make the wines
that we wanted to make,
and that we thought
were the best wines.
And by some miracle,
(laughs) our public said,
"Yeah these are pretty
good, we'll buy them."
And they've allowed us to continue to do,
what we want to do in the first place.
I gotta drink some more of this.
- [Man Offscreen] Why
don't we talk for a second
about white zinfandel?
- [Paul] (laughs) Okay.
- [Mann Offscreen] Let's talk about it.
- [Paul] Great.
(gentle orchestral music)