Notes of a BottleMonkey

Massive Ridge Vineyard Wine Review

I recently had the pleasure in participating in a wine tasting focused completely on wines produced by Ridge Vineyards. This winery is based in California and focusing on producing single vineyard premium wines. We reviewed the five of their offerings:

2006 Three Valleys

This wine is a brand new release from Ridge Vineyards. It is so new that you can't even find any tasting notes on their website at the time of this writing. This wine is a light tasting wine with a solid red fruit base. It is hot around the edges due to its 14.3% alcohol content.

2005 Lytton Springs (Spring Release)

This wine is a combination of zinfandel, petite sirah and carignane. It is a fairly full-bodied wine with a complex structure. This wine also has a high alcohol content of 14.4%.

2005 Pagani Ranch

This wine is a blend of zinfandel, petite sirah, alicante bouschet, and mourvedre. The last two grape varieties are only 1% of the blend. I wonder if they make much of an impact of the experience of the wine? This was my favorite wine out of the whole tasting. It has a wonderful smooth, silky mouthfeel with complex berries on the palate. The full experience of the wine was cut short by the high octane of 14.2% on the finish.

2005 Geyserville

The zinfandel blends trend continues with this wine by adding carignane and petite sirah to the mix. It is a rich red fruit wine with a great firm structure. Its downfall? 14.6% alcohol. It drinks like fire.

2005 York Creek

The York Creek offering is a simpler blend of zinfandel and petite sirah. This was my second favorite wine out the bunch. This might be due to the fact that I had a decent buzz after drinking all of these overly alcoholic wines. At 14.5% it was the second highest in alcohol content out of the group. Again, this wine suffers from the same flaw all these wines have. A person starts to experience the wine developing in their mouth and then it turns to fire – a definite mood killer.

I am not a big fan of the trend in California to crank up the alcohol content in wines. I don't drink wine to get drunk. I drink it as a companion to good food and good conversation. None of the above wines can be drunk with conversation alone.

At the end of the tasting, the owner of the establishment found an old bottle of Ridge in his cellar. It was a 1982 Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon (11.5% alcohol). We opened it up to give it a try, but unfortunately it was past its prime. I wish I could have tried it before it turned as it had the ghost of good character in it.