More of Rico's history

Eric Asimov has an article in The New York Times about one of Rico's favorite vineyards:

Here at the rustic wooden headquarters of Ridge Vineyards, nestled 2,400 feet up in the Santa Cruz Mountains overlooking Silicon Valley, the winery is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week, practically an eternity in the California wine business. Most wineries seize anniversaries as an opportunity for marketing and promotion, and Ridge is not immune, assembling a small group of wine writers and sommeliers for an in-depth, historical tasting of its top wines.
Ordinarily, I pay little attention to such events. But for a half-century, Ridge has made one of California’s greatest cabernet sauvignons, Monte Bello, in a remarkably consistent style independent of the twists and turns of fashion. Ridge has also been the leading standard-bearer for zinfandel, which has likewise followed a serpentine path of styles.
Perhaps because of its longevity and its consistency, and because its wines are actually available to consumers, Ridge tends to be taken for granted, its achievements noted dutifully even as attention shifts to the new, the expensive, and the scarce. That seemed reason enough to spend an afternoon visiting Ridge before the celebration.
Over the last few years, I’ve had the opportunity to drink Monte Bellos covering a range of forty vintages. The 1970 is one of the greatest California cabernets I’ve ever drunk, beautifully balanced and graceful with a pronounced minerality and the sort of herbal accents that are routinely denounced in California but which I think are integral to good cabernet.
Meanwhile, the latest release, the 2006, offers all of these qualities, along with the gentle fruit and violet flavors and aromas that you would expect to find in a young wine. In an era when cabernet growers pick grapes ever riper for wines of great power, fruit magnitude, and impact, Monte Bellos remain focused and intense yet, above all, balanced.
Not that Monte Bello hasn’t evolved at all. The first vintage, 1962, cost $3.50 a bottle. It’s now up to $145, though it is still cheap next to other elite wines. (The vineyard-designated zinfandels are more approachably priced, from $25 to $35.)
Over time, Ridge has refined its approach in the cellar, treating the youthful wine more gently so the tannins are softer and less imposing. One thing that hasn’t changed: Ridge’s reliance on American oak for its barrels, rather than the French oak that is standard for almost all leading California cabernets. In its style and the methods by which it is made, Monte Bello manages to bridge Old World and New.
In many ways this is a testament to Paul Draper, Ridge’s chief executive and winemaker, who is marking the 40th anniversary of his affiliation with the winery. For as much as Ridge wines display the greatness of place— Monte Bello as well as its two primary zinfandel vineyards in Sonoma, Geyserville, and Lytton Springs— Ridge’s success also affirms the greatness of Mr. Draper’s vision of applying traditional European techniques to wines that demonstrate the potential of California.
Indeed, it may seem odd to celebrate Mr. Draper, who attributes his success to what he calls 'nonaction'. “Our main thing is to allow grapes to show their character rather than imposing our will on them,” he told me as we looked out over the dormant cabernet vines awaiting their winter pruning.
Noninterventionist winemaking has become one of the great modern marketing clichés. But Mr. Draper’s beliefs are grounded in preindustrial techniques practiced by Europeans for centuries: rely on natural yeasts for fermentation, use minimal amounts of sulfur dioxide as a stabilizer and otherwise do as little as possible beyond gently guiding the transformation of grape juice into wine.
Crucially, he also believes that wine’s place is on the table with food, which explains why, year in and year out, Monte Bello’s alcohol content hovers around 13 percent, even as other top California cabernets break the 15 percent level. Its zinfandels are higher in alcohol, naturally, but not as high as the full-bore, high-octane zins that top most critic’s charts.
Here in the Santa Cruz Mountains, cabernet and the other Bordeaux grapes in the vineyard cannot achieve the high levels of ripeness typical of grapes grown in the warmer parts of Napa Valley. Warm air wafts over from the San Francisco Bay, fending off the fog and cold that blow in from the Pacific and moderating the temperatures just enough to ripen the grapes.
Apparently not enough for some critics. In his blog last fall, James Laube, who covers California for Wine Spectator, suggested that the cool climate made for reds that were too green and herbal to suit his taste. It was an opinion that stung Mr. Draper. “We’ve always made wines that we loved to drink,” he said. “We’ve never made for the market. Luckily, people have always bought our wines.”
Mr. Draper has always contended that he knew nothing about making wine when he joined Ridge in 1969. The winery was founded in 1959, which makes both anniversaries a bit approximate. Four scientists from Stanford Research Institute bought 80 acres on Monte Bello Ridge, including an abandoned winery and a mature vineyard. Without training, they made wine and liked the results so much that they went into business.
Mr. Draper, born in the Midwest and educated at Choate and Stanford, had served in Army intelligence in Italy, where he developed his taste for fine wine and food. After his discharge and further work for the government, Mr. Draper and two partners began an economic development project in Chile. Among other things, they had the idea of creating a model winery, making first-class wine that could be exported for hard currency.
When the partners determined that the political climate in Chile would not support a profitable enterprise, Mr. Draper returned to California with the cabernet he had made. The Ridge partners, impressed by its quality, invited Mr. Draper to join them.
Mr. Draper had no formal training, either, so he took as his guiding light an 1883 manual written by E. H. Rixford, who coincidentally planted a cabernet vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains that became legendary as La Questa. Cuttings from La Questa were the basis of the original Monte Bello vineyard, planted in 1886 by Osea Perrone, an Italian doctor from San Francisco.
Even today, getting to Monte Bello requires a harrowing 4.4-mile drive of narrow hairpin turns around which one can only pray a truck is not barreling. Whatever possessed somebody, I asked Mr. Draper, to plant a vineyard up here?
“They were Europeans,” he said. “You grew grapes where nothing else would grow.” Mr. Draper, who will turn 74 next week, has made few concessions to age. He still moves easily up and down the old steps of the restored three-level winery, where the original 19th-century redwood joists and limestone walls are covered in the sort of black mold common in ancient European cellars but rare in California. His new Acura is equipped with a five-speed manual transmission, and he doesn’t plan to rest on his laurels. “Every year we’re trying to learn something that will push us one percent or five percent forwards,” he said, “and it’s gone on for forty years.”

Rico says he bought, rather by accident, a bottle of Ridge wine for a date, some 35 years ago now, and it was exquisite. But when he went with friends up to the winery and innocently asked to buy another bottle of 1970 Mendocino zinfandel, they all laughed. Seems it was, rather by accident, the best wine they'd ever made, and the last two bottles in existence resided in a safe in the owner's office, never to be sold. (Sadly, there is not a single bottle of Mendocino zinfandel, of any vintage, available on their website. The oldest zinfandel, a 1989 from Howell Mountain, was $40 a bottle, and is sold out. The oldest available zinfandel is from 2003, at $50 and $110 a bottle.)