Verticals (2019) s01e07 Episode Script

- Our feeling has always been,
you know, can we improve,
can we push the envelope just
a little further every year.
And if possible, of course, a major step,
in terms of understanding and therefore
making even better wine
than we would have made
the previous year.
(string music)
- It's rare to have one person be involved
in one piece of land for so long.
- Paul Draper is a man of integrity.
He has been at Ridge for such a long time.
- He sort of comports
himself with a kind of
monastic serenity and just
this patience and experience.
He's a leader, he's a quality leader.
- Here at Ridge, we've
had three winemakers
in the last 60 years,
60 plus I guess years.
And, our first was one
of the founding partners
from Stanford Research, David Bennion.
After Dave Bennion,
Paul Draper was the
second winemaker at Ridge
and he really brought
Ridge into the modern world
of winemaking and shepherded
it along with this
incredible vineyard property
that they have, Monte Bello.
- They wanted to expand,
and they wanted to re-open
the old Perrone winery,
and they needed a winemaker to do that.
And David, as president and
therefore administrating
the business, couldn't
really do both jobs.
And as I say, he made the
mistake of giving me the best job
and that is as winemaker
rather than as president.
I was given the job of winemaking in '68,
and so my first vintage was '69.
- He was at the leading
edge back in the late 60s
of really helping push the success
of the California wine industry.
So it's helped really elevate this idea
that wine can be made naturally,
it doesn't have to be fussed over
and manipulated in the winery.
- Here we are, totally
traditional, and yet,
because of our scientific
partners, our founders,
they were very willing
to fund a high-tech lab,
let's call it, one that was looking into
the secondary chemistry
of what we were doing.
And trying to understand more the effects
of everything in traditional winemaking
that we did with the grapes,
and then with the wine.
We really began to build
that lab up, so by the 90s,
we had a marvelous lab
director Jim Kennedy,
who let us know in '94
that he really wanted to
go back to Davis and get his PhD.
He therefore was going to help us choose
a replacement for the lab, and
his choice was Eric Baugher,
who had never had
anything to do with wine.
- My, kind of entry into the wine industry
was just by pure
happenstance, pure chance.
So, I joined Ridge in
'94, having just graduated
with my Biochemistry and
Molecular Biology degree,
thinking of this being just short term,
just do it for a year, no more.
So I spend my first year
really doing a lot of research
and work in the lab, really setting up
a lot of the sophisticated
tests that we run,
and then a year into it, as
I was getting ready to leave,
Paul lost his cellar master.
- In the middle of '95 vintage,
my cellar foreman, he left,
and so Eric is sitting in
the lab, but at that point,
I didn't have anybody
who was really working
directly with me and with the crew.
- I couldn't leave Paul
without someone on staff
to help him with the harvest,
so I volunteered to stay on,
and Paul gave me a bunch
of responsibilities,
managing the crew, and
the crew I inherited
were just fabulous men,
I mean really dedicated to quality,
so it was a great time
to join with those men
and work alongside them
and really help move the quality along.
- You know you can't ask
people do do something
that you don't know how to do.
And so Eric then had to
really learn racking,
he had to learn what we did
through fermentation process,
he had to learn the holy grail
of traditional winemaking.
- And before I knew it, '96 rolled around,
and I hadn't left yet, I just continued on
and Paul just kept giving me
more and more responsibility
and I just got my hands
dirtier and dirtier
every vintage, and got so
much more involved in it,
but, you know, 25 years have
rolled by really quickly.
- And so over those next
years, he was working with me
as he learned our approach
to fine winemaking.
So we had this period of
transition when really,
I said from that point on,
you're going to do the majority of this.
- You know, he's just been a great mentor,
and just really behind
me, really helping push
the quality higher and
higher with every vintage.
- The great thing for us
was that you hadn't
gone to Davis or Fresno,
so you hadn't been indoctrinated into,
there is only one way to make wine,
and it's with these additives,
and it's with this approach,
and so we didn't have to, we
didn't have to retrain you.
- Yeah you didn't have to
retrain me, reprogram me, yeah.
- So then in '95, I was
mentioning that we lost
our cellar foreman in
the middle of harvest,
and you stepped up and said,
can I help with the work orders
and then every year from then on,
you asked for more and
more and more involvement
and so '95 was really the first time --
- Well, all of that really kept
me interested in being here.
- So you know, Alicante
Bouschet, technically,
it's one of the varietals
that has red juice,
so it's, you know, given that every other,
all the fine red wines,
the grape skins are red,
and they're the ones,
the skins give the color,
but the juice itself is white, you know,
and here we are with something
that was used to add color
and the Paganis who planted this
almost exactly 100 years ago
just as they saw prohibition coming,
they planted Alicante
because people back east
were making home wine
and they were buying Thompson's seedless,
but they wanted red wine.
And so if you sent them
Thompson's seedless
and Alicante, they could
ferment them together,
and get this red wine.
- But also it's thick-skinned so it could
actually go across the country, yeah.
- Yes, it could, no problem.
And of course, Pagani wasn't
growing Thompson seedless,
but railroad car loads were going across.
- Yeah, I mean they had like
three big blocks of it planted,
I mean we took one block and made this.
- Anyway we decided that we
would try to show our customers
what Alicante was all about.
So here's the Alicante.
- Yeah, so Alicante.
- I think you and I remember the '95 being
our favorite of the--
- Yeah, cause it was a cooler year.
I mean this is already a cool
site, too, Sonoma Valley.
- Yeah, and, you know,
maybe if we had been able
to make this quality every year,
- Oh, look at that color.
- God, yeah, I mean this is,
see, when you start
with red juice already,
and we also learned I
think probably in '94
the year before this,
that we really had to
pull back on extraction,
because the tannins in
Alicante are so prevalent
and so rustic.
We don't have much reserve, but I'll bet,
well we'll see, we'll taste it,
I'll bet this may go for
years because of the tannins.
- I mean it's got the really exotic nose.
- The spice Alicante has,
some wonderful spice,
really different.
- Yeah, and really high toned,
I mean it's evolved as well,
so there's a bit of, kind
of, the forest, cedar-y,
wood notes, with some
really bright red fruit.
- But behind that all, despite
having controlled the tannins
it is really a mouthful of
wine with not harsh tannins,
but really big, it fills your mouth.
- Nice juicy acid.
- Yeah there's good
acid, so, it needs that.
- But according to your notes,
we shoulda drank this
about, like 14 years ago.
- Did I say that we could
keep it for ten years,
no, oh my god.
- No, no, you said drink
it young, 4-5 years out.
- And I think I already may
have mentioned the story
of when I was being asked
occasionally to give a lecture
to the master of wine students,
they asked me to bring a wine with me
for them to taste blind,
and so I took this 95 Alicante.
And here, all these pros,
and I said, what is it,
and they named every imaginable, you know,
Portuguese varieties, and so --
- [Eric] Yeah, it does
have a bit of that element.
- Nobody ever mentioned
Alicante, so, good, great.
(laughing)
How did Ridge get into Zinfandel?
I mean, we're one of the few
people, there are several now,
but, back then, you either
made cabernet and chardonnay,
and of course today,
there'd be other people
making pinot noir, and
chardonnay, but to my knowledge,
there are not too many people in that era
back in the 60s, let alone 70s,
that were making cabernet and zinfandel
as their two major
contributions to their market.
- We're following very
much what was kind of
the fashionable style of
Zinfandel in the 19th century,
I mean that's really what
the founders of Ridge,
when they started playing
around with Zinfandel in 1964,
working with grapes on Monte Bello road,
in this cool climate,
that's what they produced.
- And the reason was, we didn't
have enough wine to sell.
And we weren't buying cabernet,
and it was a matter of,
until our cabernet plantings,
our replants, come in,
which they didn't do until,
god, the mid-late 70s,
we needed something to sell to survive.
And so zinfandel was the answer.
And that leads into something
that not everybody knows
that we got into, but, when I joined,
one of the wines that they were making,
or had just started making,
from some old vines,
if they didn't get the intensity,
they were doing what the
French call a sagneé,
is draining off some of the juice
and they were making a tiny
amount of white zinfandel.
And so, here's Ridge today,
known for the zinfandels
we've made more than 50
years, and here we were,
in a very small way,
making white zinfandel.
But they made something that
we could sell immediately,
like, six months out, we
could put this on the market
and get some cash.
Our red wines, my god, in those days,
we weren't releasing
our reds for four years.
And so, we saw nothing coming back.
And to have that little
bit of white zinfandel
that was giving us immediate
cash was incredibly important.
- Yeah, you know, white zin, I mean,
it's what saved a lot
of these old vineyeards
from being ripped out, you know,
in the 60s and 70s when zinfandel
had such a low reputation,
a lot of farmers that had
zinfandel in the ground
you know, their real only
outlet of selling grapes
was to producers making
wines, white zinfandel.
So white zin did save
a lot of these ancient
zinfandel vineyards from their
demise, but, at the same time
it damaged a reputation, you know,
made such a simple pedestrian
wine, that, you know,
it was hard to take zinfandel serious
when that was, you know,
big letters on the label,
promoting this really simple style.
- What happened was, that
as we got into the early 80s
and even mid-80s, we
were still making some,
and we were not adding sugar,
we were barrel aging it,
and people loved it, but,
we realized that we were spending as much
in terms of winemaking,
on making white zinfandel,
as we would be on making chardonnay,
I mean it was just absurd.
- But, you know, after '86,
that was pretty much it,
I mean Paul, thankfully,
stopped producing it
so I joined '94, we were
already out of that business,
and it was so great to not have to be
making white zinfandel.
- I have never tasted a single
white zin ever made here.
Ooh, it's got beautiful,
really nice fruit on the cork.
And, pretty evolved color here.
Wow.
Hints of fruit still there,
it's like the cork absorbed
most of it I think.
Mmm.
Wow.
I could imagine when this
was young, how delicious,
and the appeal of white zin.
I mean the fruit is still
there on the palate,
it's turned, it's like,
what chardonnay does
with time and bottle, totally changes.
It's still got the fruit but
it's still kind of pie crust,
and like, berry cobbler.
Mmm, and high acid, oh
it's still delicious.
I'd drink the whole bottle (laughing).
And they use a little tiny cork,
no need for, you know, a wine like this,
I'm sure most of this was drunk
within days of being
bought here at the winery.
This bottle would be very
rare, since, you know,
the mass production here at the time was
for the full extracted red zinfandels.
This woulda just been a
tiny little production,
you know, from the sagneés
that they collected
from the, kind of the
juicing of the clusters
on the transport from the
vineyeard to the winery,
just as they packed in the gondola.
- Anyway, it was fun,
it was a great period,
we think we made a very unusual white zin,
but it's not what we do.
Red zinfandel, finding
these old vineyards,
and it started with
Monte Bello in terms of,
what are the vineyards that we've found
that we can work with,
that make themselves,
where everything that is
there in the vineyard,
in the grapes, is in balance.
We don't have to step
in hard as winemakers
to make the kind of
quality we need to make.
- We are in the old part
of the Monte Bello winery
built by Oseo Perrone in 1892.
Completed in time for the 1892 harvest.
And down here, is where we are
cellaring all our zinfandels,
mostly, and a few of the
smaller, unusual, unique wines
for advanced tasting program.
But this is where we have
our flagship zinfandel,
the Geyserville, and this is
an American oak barrel maker,
World Cooperage, from 2014.
So we don't always age our
zinfandels in a lot of new oak.
So this is actually a four year old barrel
so it's not imparting such
a strong flavor to the wine.
You know, when you go
to a brand new barrel,
it's gonna have the strongest flavor,
which can sometimes mask a
lot of the beautiful fruit
of zinfandel, so I often like to go
to the older barrels first, and with that,
you get a greater feel for
the wine's personality.
And for how the tannins
are starting to soften.
You know it's also nice to kind of look at
the color of the wine.
Mm, yeah, this is exactly Geyserville.
Really rich fruit, stone fruit,
lots of plum, cherry,
the Geyserville mint, which
is an attractive element
that I always find in
virtually every vintage
of Geyserville.
Mm, yeah, it's coming along nicely.
Winemaking is purely the art, tasting,
relying on the palate.
Science is really once the wine's made,
just keeping it
on that straight and
narrow path to bottle,
just making sure
the wine hasn't lost any of
its quality along the way.
When I started here, I
really found the perfect home
to really put to full use
my abilities of tasting.
So, I picked our 2005 estate chardonnay
because this was a rather
challenging growing season
on the mountain.
We were clobbered during bloom,
so the rains that came late
that year hit the vines,
summer weather was really
kind of challenging
with the fogs that kept
coming into the vineyards,
and really kicked up a
lot of mildew pressure.
So, I kinda worried that then, you know,
we were gonna run into some other issues
where maybe the yeast
wouldn't finish the sugar,
that the malolactic would stick,
and of course that did happen.
What I learned in this
vintage was one great method
of natural winemaking,
which was to take 2005 and
rack over onto 2006 lee.
- Lees are everything that's left over
in the process of making one
once fermentation is finished.
So, all the dead yeast cells,
any of the little bits of grape skin,
that might have gotten through, you know,
the initial processing,
all the stuff that settles
into the bottom of the barrel
or a tank, when a wine is being made.
- As soon as the 2006
lots were all finished,
I was moving some of the
2006 out of their barrel
but leaving the lee behind
to put the 2005 on top of
which then I was able to do battonage.
- Battonage is stirring up the lees.
It enhances texture, it enhances richness,
you can often get a toasty,
nutty kind of character
if you get a lot of lees exposure
and you keep them suspended
in the wine, over time.
- I was able to get the
yeast to finish sugar,
malolactics finished, we
were able to get this wine
basically done by having
2006 save the vintage.
And so it was like, something
that was pretty amazing
that that all worked, otherwise,
I was afraid that the whole
2005 was just gonna be
having to be declassified entirely,
we'd have to get rid of the wine.
There's always a natural
way around difficult times.
You just have to be on top of it.
But it worked out, I mean,
I haven't had this wine
in a number of years,
we didn't keep much reserve
because it all sold really well.
It did get some high scores with critics,
which was kinda shocking, I mean,
we don't make wine for the critics,
but it does feel good at times.
Let's see if I can get the cork out.
Oh, it smells amazing.
And there it is, it's like
gold, and very viscous.
Oh my gosh, yeah, it's incredible.
Beautiful amber color.
Wow.
Gosh, it almost tastes like a sauterne.
I mean, luckily it's not sweet,
but it's just got this
really rich rich fruit.
What I see with our chardonnay
is it takes about a ten year period
to go from really super
young, youthful fruit,
where it's really crisp
apple, pear, pineapple,
kinda then develops into
more of the nuttiness,
butterscotch, you know, honey, you know,
and it gets down to that plateau
but it takes about ten
years to get to that point,
and then on that plateau,
it can hold, I mean,
you can still open up bottles from the 80s
where it's at this point, and
they're just cruisin on out.
Really comes down to the cork, too,
really, this one hardly soaked through,
so it still really held a
good seal on the bottle.
So, you know, something like this,
I can easily still see
going another 15 years.
- If you change winemakers,
you can really change
just what you're doing,
what the wines are like.
And so in a sense, the consistency, sure,
because I've been here,
but also because we've got
John and Eric and David.
We've carried on with this
approach to winemaking
and grape growing.
Winemaking has been such a part of my life
that I don't want to say I'm a workaholic,
but to a degree, I think my wife would say
that within reason, it
is so important to me,
Eric is even more so.
What he's doing here, his job,
the love of winemaking
that he's developed,
from somebody who had never
had a really fine wine
in his life.