Ridge Vineyards

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A bottle of Ridge Zinfandel.

Ridge Vineyards is a winery with two locations: the original headquarters, located at an elevation of 2,300 feet (700 m) on Monte Bello Ridge in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Cupertino, California, and a secondary winery at Lytton Springs in Sonoma County. Predecessors at the site of the Monte Bello winery date back to the 1890s.

Ridge has been under the direction of winemaker Paul Draper since the 1960s, when he was hired by David Bennion, and has emphasized natural, ecologically sustainable farming and fermentation.^[1] Ridge also focuses on single-estate wines where the grapes for a particular label are all grown at the same vineyard. Draper is known for drying his own oak staves for use in barrels, which may be a component of the dusky "Draper Perfume" that is characteristic of Ridge wines.

The signature wine of Ridge is its Monte Bello, a "field blend" of Cabernet Sauvignon mixed with varying percentages of other grapes grown in the same location, usually including Merlot and Petit Verdot, with occasional Cabernet franc.

Monte Bello's international reputation was enhanced when it achieved fifth place in the "Judgment of Paris", against nine other French and California wines, and in subsequent competitions, including "The Wine Rematch of the Century", the 30th anniversary retesting of the same red wines evaluated in the 1976 Paris wine competition. In this blind tasting, held both in the US and the UK, judges in both countries ranked Ridge Monte Bello number one among all the wines judged.

Ridge's Zinfandels (or mostly-Zinfandel field blends) constitute the bulk of the winery's production. Using grapes from selected sites from all over the state and bottling them each under their own label, Ridge Zinfandels emphasize the particular characteristics of each growing site and may show different aging charactersitics than do other zinfandels. Among the best known of the Ridge Zinfandels or Zinfandel-blends are those from Geyserville, York Creek, and Lytton Springs.