Last Night's Tipple

Wanna know who, more than anyone else, is responsible for the large number of good red Zinfandel wines that are available from California? It's Bob Trinchero of Sutter Home winery. Sutter Home makes a red Zin, but that's not why Trinchero is responsible for red Zin in California. He's responsible because he's the person who made a commercial success out of white Zinfandel wine. In red vitis vinifera grapes, all of the pigment is in the skins. The juice from red grapes is the same color as the juice from white grapes. Wine becomes red when it sits on its skins (or, rather, usually below its skins) while it's fermenting. Therefore, it's possible to make white wine from red grapes by separating the juice from the skins immediately after crushing; and it's possible to make pink wine from red grapes by separating the skins from the juice after a short duration of contact. Other wineries had made white Zinfandel and pink Zinfandel before. Sutter Home made it honest-to-God bubblegum pink, and they made it off-dry. It became such a huge success that every other winery imitated them. Making all that white Zinfandel required a whole heck of a lot of Zinfandel grapes, and it provided the financial incentive that grape growers needed to stop tearing out their old Zinfandel vines and replacing them with Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot.

So, thank you, Bob Trinchero. If it weren't for you, the vines that Ridge and Ravenswood and all the other great producers of red Zinfandel rely on might have long since gone the way of the dodo, and that would be a shame.

Last Night's Tipple

Ridge's 2003 Independence School Zinfandel is unusual for Ridge in that it's not a single-vineyard wine. According to the winemaker's notes, the grapes for this wine were sourced from a number of small vineyards in Geyserville Township near the two-room 1870 Independence School, which served "served the ranches south of Geyserville for nearly a century." This is apparently a one-off wine -- Ridge never made it before 2003 and hasn't made it since. Despite the fact that the grapes for this wine come from near Geyserville, there is no indication that this is really a second wine for Ridge Geyserville -- the description of the properties is completely different from Ridge's description of the three adjacent vineyards that are used to produce Geyserville, and the notes specifically say that Independence School is not a single-site wine. This is complete speculation, but I would not be surprised if the vine grower had a contract for these grapes to go to another winery that fell through at the last minute and that Ridge took them because they had space and knew that they could make good wine out of them.

And it is good wine. It doesn't have quite the silky sensuousness of, say, Geyserville or Ponzo Vineyard, but it is polished and pleasant. It has a distinctive briary, brambley aroma that I associate with Zinfandel but that isn't present in other Ridge Zins that I've tried. This makes it more rustic than a standard Ridge, to my mind. Well, maybe "rustic" is a bit much. No Paul Draper-made wines are rustic. But it certainly is suburban or maybe even exurban.