Have you been checking out our videos lately? If not, now is a great time to have a look, as we’ve added some outstanding Harvest 2010 images, including a great new video of crush tasking place at the Monte Bello winery:
For more access to Ridge Vineyards video, please visit our channel on YouTube, found here.
To all you numerologists, cosmologists, fatalists, virusists, marathoners, protesters, documentarians, and whomever else may be celebrating the singular synchronicity of tomorrow being 10.10.10, my apologies to all, for to me, tomorrow is nothing other than the birthday of Thelonious Monk, that great and eccentric compositional genius of the jazz piano. And that’s what I’ll be celebrating.
Look for a special post tomorrow all about Jazz , Wine, and Monk, and if you happen to be in the vicinity of our Monte Bello Tasting Room, please join us for a great day of great wine, and nothing but Thelonious Monk coming through the speakers!
Our recent Wine Bloggers Tasting is fresh in my mind today as I (finally!) commence working on my wrap-up of the event, and as I sit at the typer trying to work a bit of magic, I am both elated AND chagrined to note that a number of our guests have already put up their posts!
It truly was a fascinating experience; the selection of wines (10 vintages of Lytton Springs and 3 back-vintage Monte Bellos!), the singularity of the setting (the Lytton Springs crush pad!), and of course the company, all combined to make for a more-than memorable afternoon, and should you wish to indulge in some delightfully spun renditions of the day’s happenings, I encourage you to check out these posts:
From Marcy Gordon –travel writer, arch wine enthusiast, lunar conspiracist– comes the following on her Come For The Wine blog: http://comeforthewine.blogspot.com/2010/10/ridge-lytton-springs-wine-blogger.html
From Richard Jennings –oenophilic prolificism incarnate– comes the following on his RJ on Wine blog:
http://www.rjonwine.com/2010/10/ridge-lytton-springs-bloggers-tasting-10-vintages-of-lytton-springs-plus-small-format-monte-bello/
From Dave Tong –resident local expert on all things Santa Clara Valley and Santa Cruz Mountains– comes the following on his fine blog:
http://scmwine.blogspot.com/2010/09/ridge-bloggers-tasting-3.html
And from our new friend Joe Herrig over at Subarban Wino, one of the more singular run-downs of the event; a post in which I’m happy to note that a picture of my hand is in the fine visual company of Anna Nicole Smith, Jack Palance, and Haley Joel Osment! You can find it here:
http://www.suburbanwino.com/2010/10/well-aged.html
Cheers!
Then have we got an event for you!
Kick off your week right with a Ridge Vineyards tasting at California Wine Merchant in San Francisco. Join Ridge’s Christina Donley Monday, October 18 from 6 to 9 for a sampling of single-vineyard zinfandels and the world-renowned Monte Bello. For only $20, taste wines such as the 2008 Lytton Springs, Pagani Ranch, and East Bench. Christina will also be sharing the very-limited 2008 Chardonnay Santa Cruz Mountains Estate and the highly rated 2007 Monte Bello. In addition, receive 15% off purchases the evening of the event. We hope to see you there! California Wine Merchant 2113 Chestnut Street, San Francisco Monday, October 18, 6-9pm $20
For more about California Wine Merchant, please click here!
If you’re on our mailing list, you will have this morning received an e-mail from us, and amongst all the other juicy items in said e-mail, you will have likely noted a special web offer on a rare library offering; the 2001 Dusi Ranch. And just in case you’re wondering how this wine is showing, I thought I’d offer some tasting notes; these were written back in March of 2010, during the tasting session in which this wine was selected for release.
Ridge Vineyards 2001 Dusi Ranch
Aromatics rich with dense, concentrated, and decadently ripe fruit, highlighting unctuous and ingratiating strains of baked sweet plum that carry over into the front and mid-palate. The mouthfeel is tremendously viscous, with remarkably well-honed, near briery acidity emerging towards the back-palate. The finish is to the short side, but reveals a pleasantly chalky minerality and tannin profile.
Well, we’re getting closer and closer to the finish line; Miss Mother Nature has very kindly been supplying copious amounts of warmth and sunshine, and while we’ve of course had to drop quite a bit of fruit, the remaining clusters and berries should be concentrated to the nth, and I’m happy to say that my lil’ vine is hangin’ tough; all this means that I’ll soon be able to shave this wickedness of beard co-opting my face! (You may remember a previous post in which I pledged to grow a beard and not shave it until my vine was harvested. If you missed that one, you can find it here.)
Vine Watch? Beard Watch!
Vine Watch?
Beard Watch!
The brilliant and brilliantly troubled poet Anne Sexton passed away on this day in 1974, after a life touched with both greatness and tragedy; a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967, her suicide in 1974.
Lauded as the archetypal “confessional” poet, to me she was a great sensualist, a mendicant at the door of meaning, seeking to render the intangible as imaginable. Because of the depths of honesty on display, much of her work is truly heartbreaking; in it you will find grief, loss, depression, and pain, but also beauty; a true understanding of beauty in all its irreconcilable dualities. The following is from a poem entitled “When The Glass Of My Body Broke”, and in it I find one of the great sensual references to wine ever written:
Oh mother of sex,
lady of the staggering cuddle,
where do these hands come from?
A man, a Moby Dick of a man,
a swimmer going up and down in his brain,
the gentleness of wine in his fingertips,
where do these hands come from?
I was born a glass baby and nobody picked me up
except to wash the dust off me.
He has picked me up and licked me alive.
We remember you Anne Sexton, and thank you for your beautiful, agonizing, and moving works.
I am happy to announce that we’ve just now rolled out a new ATP release; the much-anticipated 2006 Mazzoni Home Ranch!
2006 Mazzoni Home Ranch
It’s shipping out to ATP Members in about a week, and will come available in the tasting rooms in November, but since we had the opportunity to taste it at yesterday’s First Friday event, I thought I’d share some early tasting notes:
Deep, deep — smoke-on-the-water-deep — purple in the glass, with a glisteningly luminescent raspberry limn and an impenetrable, near baroque richness and depth showing in the belly of the bowl … Strong blueberry and cocoa powder notes dominate the aromatics, with hints hints of cedar and balsa wood, and a fresh, possibly carignane-derived sense of clear creek-water creeping in … Tremendously vibrant and expressive acidity immediately at point-of-entry, flaring up and flaring out firework style, leaving in its glittering wake a resoundingly chalky minerality coating the full range of the mid-palate … dark berry notes continue to prevail, though progressively giving way to a tarter, more cherry and yellow-flesh plum tanginess … the finish is both primarily acidity-driven, and preposterously lengthy; mostly structure-dominated, with flashes of fruit still shining through … Overall; complex, unique, saturated and and expressive, destined for success at table, and with years of maturation still to come …
To me, it’s like a chant, a hymn to the divine. The drone of a low D string, the hum of Uilleann pipes. A numerical mantra, viticultural sutra. The relentless march of an Underwood’s clacking keys, the thump-tom-thump-tap-slide of a walking doghouse bass. The sound, over and over, trip-hop and country blues, Ireland’s May Morning Dew and India’s Punjabi soul. It’s lucidity and ever-looping dreams, an abacus to circle all the world. It’s a motto, a theme, a tattoo on the inside of your eyelids. It’s a novice drummer’s debut on the stage, counting out the rhythms under breaths that couldn’t possibly come quicker, it’s the mojo magic circularious life: 91, 92, 94, 91, 92, 94, 91, 92, 94 …
(for more about our new Monte Bello Library Tasting, please click here)
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