This California winery has barely changed in 60 years - and it's never been more relevant
CEO and head winemaker John Olney, left, with winemaker Shauna Rosenblum at Ridge Vineyards Lytton Springs in Healdsburg. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
It's rare for a California winery to last for 64 years. It's even rarer for it to remain fundamentally unchanged during that span.
Yet Ridge Vineyards is much the same as it was in the 1960s. Its labels still use the same distinctive, green-and-black Optima font. It's still growing Cabernet Sauvignon at its flagship vineyard, Monte Bello, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And it's still producing bold, full-bodied, red wines, which continue to have an arresting way of holding balance despite their often considerable heft.
This constancy has given Ridge - which operates two wineries, one in Cupertino in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and the other in Healdsburg in Dry Creek Valley - a sense not only of timelessness, but of relevance to the current moment. Under longtime winemaker Paul Draper, Ridge was practicing low-intervention (Draper called it "pre-industrial") winemaking a half-century before it became a buzzword. The winery was preserving historic vineyards long before "heritage wines" came into vogue and listing ingredients on its back labels long before most other wineries were speaking openly about wine additives.
Beth Rosemond, left, and Thea Adams drink wine outside the Ridge winery in Cupertino, overlooking Silicon Valley, in 2023. (Salgu Wissmath/S.F. Chronicle)
In a moment when wine consumption is cratering, the industry is in crisis, and many California wineries are scurrying to reinvent themselves, Ridge's example suggests that sometimes the best course of action is to stay the course.
The lore of Ridge is well known within wine circles. An Italian doctor first planted grapes and built a winery at Monte Bello, a 2,600-foot peak studded with limestone, in 1885, but the site grew neglected. In the 1960s, four Stanford Research Institute engineers revived it, producing Monte Bello Cabernet on what current CEO and head winemaker John Olney described as "really, literally, a shoestring budget." The partners replanted the distressed vineyard, and while they were waiting for it to mature, they searched for other grapes to buy. Although they hoped for more Cabernet, what they found was Zinfandel, grown in warmer climates such as Paso Robles and Dry Creek Valley. That became the basis of a bifurcated approach: Cab grown in Monte Bello's high-elevation, limestone soils; and old-vine Zinfandel sourced from historic vineyards throughout the state.
The real turning point for Ridge came in 1969, when the owners hired Draper. The Stanford philosophy graduate taught himself winemaking by reading 19th-century manuals in French, landing on an approach that he would later come to call "pre-industrial winemaking." Preempting the philosophy that would come to define the natural wine movement, Draper rejected the chemicals that seemed, to many midcentury California winemakers, a modern miracle. He let ambient yeast ferment the grapes, didn't add bacteria or enzymes, eschewed sterile filtration and didn't adjust color or tannins with additives.
Ridge produces what many consider to be the best Cabernet Sauvignon in California, called Monte Bello, but is also well known for its Zinfandel blends such as Lytton Springs. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
Perhaps Draper's quirkiest contribution to the annals of winemaking was his exclusive use of American oak barrels, a practice that persists at Ridge. In the '60s, in an effort to imitate French practices, California winemakers started to age their wines in oak barrels, abandoning the hulking redwood and chestnut vats that had long been the standard. Nearly all of these ambitious, quality-minded producers bought barrels made from oak grown in French forests. But Draper, according to Olney, read a study from the turn of the century that found American-grown oak barrels preferable to those made of wood from France, Hungary or Austria.
Besides, "Paul was adamant that he did not want Ridge to be considered an imitation Bordeaux," Olney said. While his peers were using fancy imported oak from France, Draper bought what were essentially bourbon barrels (though they were not charred, as is required for bourbon production). "It was pretty gutsy for Paul to do that," Olney said: To this day, many vintners dismiss American-grown oak because they believe it imparts undesirable flavors like coconut and dill, as opposed to the toasty vanilla notes common from French wood. However, Olney continued, "I think it really has become an identity of the wine."
The winery at Ridge Lytton Springs. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
By the 1980s, Ridge had reached a plateau. Its wines were acclaimed, but some of its most important bottlings, particularly the Lytton Springs and Geyserville Zinfandels, came from vineyards owned by other farmers. Ridge wanted to control the winegrowing process from beginning to end, and to prevent fruit price spikes, but couldn't afford the real estate. So the owners became open to the possibility of a sale.
Corporations like Nestle and Coca-Cola - both betting big at the time on the California wine industry - were interested, according to Olney, but Draper feared that they'd bastardize the label, turning Monte Bello into a mega-brand sourced from grapes throughout the state. Instead, in 1986, Ridge sold to Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. of Japan. Owner Akihiko Otsuka, a wine collector, counted Monte Bello as his favorite wine, and Draper took him at his word that he didn't want to change a thing - though he did enable Ridge to buy the Lytton Springs vineyard in Healdsburg and establish its second winery there in 1991. From the outside, the Otsuka acquisition continues to look like one of California wine's most successful corporate takeovers. Ridge is still Ridge.
Granted, some things did change. In the mid-'90s, the winery began producing a less expensive Zinfandel that combined grapes from several regions, rather than the single-vineyard wines Ridge was known for. Initially they called it Sonoma Station, and by 2001 it was known as Three Valleys. Today, this $30 bottling - the winery's largest-volume output, around 25,000 of the 90,000 total cases it produces each year - is the gateway to Ridge. In grocery stores around the country, Three Valleys appears on the "red blend" shelf alongside mass-market hits such as the Prisoner and Apothic, and it's invariably the best (and usually lightest-bodied) option on that shelf - brambly, fruity and bold, but balanced.
Vines planted in 1910 at the Lytton Springs vineyard in Healdsburg. (Erik Castro/For the S.F. Chronicle)
It's notable that the proliferation of Three Valleys hasn't diminished the reputation of Ridge's pricier wines, especially the Monte Bello. That Cabernet Sauvignon blend is worth its $325 price tag and its icon status as one of the world's great wines: It's both powerful and graceful, with concentrated, dark-berry flavors that never veer jammy and a vibrant, mouthwatering acidity. Monte Bello's firm, sometimes chalky tannins lend some of its long aging potential, and there is always a resounding sense of minerality - thanks, presumably, to those limestone soils. Ridge's equal deftness at the high end and the low is one of many apparent incongruities that the winery has managed to balance comfortably.
The enduring sense of continuity becomes clear on a visit to either of Ridge's two tasting rooms. While many California wineries are racing to offer ever-more-elaborate tasting "experiences," Ridge's is refreshingly low-key. For $35, you'll sit at the bar or at a table, and an employee will take you through an ostensibly four-wine flight - though almost everyone gets a bonus pour or two. Outdoor tables afford spectacular views on a warm day, either towering over the busy quilt of Silicon Valley in Cupertino or overlooking the gnarled old Lytton Springs vines in Healdsburg.
Ridge, whose Cupertino winery is seen here in 2023, is known for its exclusive use of American-grown oak barrels, as opposed to the French barrels more common among high-end wineries. (Salgu Wissmath/S.F. Chronicle)
A visit to either location lacks the slick polish of many winery tastings nowadays, and staff seem to have a knack for repeating information about the wines that other colleagues have just told you. But that's part of Ridge's unflashy charm. If there's a more meaningful issue with the Ridge experience, it's that the flights, especially this time of year, tend to be monolithic progressions of big reds. That's reflective of Ridge's portfolio. Still, someone craving a splash of cold white wine might find their palate overwhelmed with tannin.
Unlike in the past, there are more white wines available, even if they aren't on the tasting-flight menu. Whereas Ridge long produced only one white, a Chardonnay from the Monte Bello vineyard, it now also makes Grenache Blanc, Chenin Blanc and rosé. In a break from its hearty-reds persona, Ridge is also dabbling in lighter reds now, too - Valdiguié and, as of the 2025 harvest, Gamay.
These efforts could be interpreted as examples of trend chasing, but Olney makes a convincing case that they're not. He said that the winemaking team is simply making the wines that they want to drink, and these changes are reflective of their own evolving palates. The Valdiguié, which Olney said is the winemaking team's current favorite, may be lighter than the traditional Ridge reds, but its ethos is the same. It's a field blend incorporating Charbono and Petite Sirah, all its grapes grown at Calistoga's Frediani Ranch, whose knotty, twisted vines date to the 1930s. Ridge calls the wine simply "Frediani Ranch," without reference to the grape varieties contained therein.
On a recent visit to the Cupertino tasting room, the 2022 Frediani was the first wine in the tasting flight and, as it turned out, the best. The wine tastes juicy and lithe, devoid of heavy tannins, gushing with cranberry and licorice. That it happens to be dominated by a faddish, chillable-red grape is incidental to the fact that it's from a family-owned, historic vineyard - a quintessential Ridge wine if there ever was one.
