Last Night's Tipple

The most commercially influential wine rating scheme in use today is the 100 point system. Popularized (although not invented) by wine critic Robert Parker in the 1980s and now adopted by most wine publications that rate wine, it's actually not really a 100 point system: if the liquid in the bottle is wine, then the minimum score it can get is 50 points. Any wine that it not badly flawed will get a score above 75 points; and in order to be commercially viable, the score has to be above 85 points. Well, at least if the wine costs more than $10 a bottle and is not available in unlimited quantities. Yes, ratings matter in the wine business, and they matter a great deal. Wine publications are widely read by enthusiasts (and those who fancy themselves as enthusiasts or want to be regarded as such), and a score below 85 for a wine from, say, Ridge, would be the commercial kiss of death. Nobody wants to buy bad wine, and a large percentage of consumers rely on wine publications to tell them what wine is good and what wine is bad.

And wine merchants take full advantage of this insecurity in the American consumer. Anyone who has been to a wine store has been bombarded by those little shelf talkers, which show the wine's score in some publication in a big, bolded number, followed by the blurb that that the publication had about the wine in smaller, unbolded type. For Parker and for most or all of the others that use the 100 point system, the score was intended to be nothing more than a quick reference. The description in the text was where the real meat of the review was supposed to be. Of course, it hasn't really worked out that way; and a lot of wine consumers seem to buy on the basis of the score alone.

I'd like to say that I'm completely uninfluenced by the scores shown on the shelf talkers in wine stores, but I know that this isn't accurate. I can say that I strive to be: a number tells you nothing whatever about a wine. It's even more worthless than a review by someone whose palate and preferences are different from your own. Chasing scores is unlikely to lead to good purchases.

And what scores has the 2005 Ridge Lytton Springs received? Beats me. I suspect that they're not that good, though, because of the lack of mention of them on the K&L Wine Merchants website. I can honestly say that I don't care, though. I liked this wine, and I liked it a lot. If the Wine Spectator or Robert Parker didn't, well, that's just more of it left for me.

Last Night's Tipple

I try not to read reviews of the liquors, wines, and beers that I drink for two reasons. First, I would rather not have my reaction to the wine influenced by the opinions of others. Second, I often read what others think about what I drink and get indignant about what is going through their minds, and there is no point in that. Well, I violated my rule and searched out comments about the 2005 Ridge Lytton Springs, and I was immediately reminded of why that's my rule. It seems that a lot of people think that the 2005 Lytton Springs is disappointing, that it lacks in fruit, concentration, and charm, and that it is not nearly as good as previous efforts. I don't agree with that at all. There was lots of fruit, including the briary Zinberry flavor that is common to Zinfandel, and the fruit coated my nose with its aromas and my palate with its flavors. It did not taste alcoholic, despite the fact that it was well over 14.5% alcohol. I thought that it was delicious, and much more enjoyable than the 1998 Lytton Springs that I opened a couple of weeks ago. It joins the top tier of Ridge wines that I have tried recently, and I would happily buy it again despite its expense.

So why do so many people think that this wine doesn't live up to their previous Ridge experiences? I have no idea, and it really doesn't matter to me. What matters is how I enjoy a wine, not whether others agree with me; and I enjoyed this wine.

Last Night's Tipple

In addition to the grapes that William Dickerson sells to Ravenswood, he also retains a portion of the grapes he grows and has them vinified and sold under his own label. Some of these grapes are Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Ruby Cabernet (a UC-Davis-created cross between Cabernet Sauvignon and Carignane that has mostly been used for Central Valley bulk wines but that Dickerson insists can make good juice when properly cultivated and vinified), which Ravenswood would not be interested in for their single-vineyard wines. But there is also a Dickerson Vineyards Limited Reserve Zinfandel. And guess who the winemaker is for all of the Dickerson Vineyards wines? That's right: Joel Peterson, the Ravenswood winemaker. So how does Dickerson decide which Zinfandel goes to Ravenswood and which goes into his own wine? And how does his Zinfandel differ from the Ravenswood Dickerson Vineyard Zin? Beats the heck out of me. I'd like to try it, though.

The remainder of the 2005 Ravenswood Dickerson Vineyard Zin bottle that I had last night actually showed better than it did when I first opened it. I don't know, maybe the time open softened the tannins in the wine (although it didn't seem overly tannic to me). But in any case, the fruit showed up to a greater extent, and I liked it more. Which is to say that I liked it greatly indeed.

Last Night's Tipple

Sigh. The picture of the label to the right is of the correct wine but of the incorrect vintage. You wouldn't believe how difficult it is to find a usable picture of a bottle (or label) of 2005 Ravenswood Dickerson Vineyard Zinfandel online, so the 1994 label will have to do. Don't worry: the 2005 looks largely similar.

Anyway, Dickerson Vineyard is in Napa County, and it is one of the very first vineyards that Joel Peterson and Ravenswood sourced fruit from. It's owned by William Dickerson, a psychiatrist with a thing for wine who had backed Joseph Heitz financially when Heitz was first starting out and had begun to make his famous Martha's Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. 40% of the Zinfandel in Dickerson's Vineyard is 77 years old, 30% is 28 years old, and 30% is 22 years old; in other words, it is reasonably old on average, but not the ancient vines that one finds on some of the many highly-reputed Zinfandel sites. The vineyard is bordered by eucalyptus trees, and Ravenswood claims that that eucalyptus from the trees comes through in the wine. To be honest, I don't get that. What I do get is a bit of the raspberries and cream that I tasted in the Ravenswood Sonoma County Zin, only here that flavor is less exuberant. This wine is more sedate, elegant. I like it. I wish that Spec's had had the Old Hill Zin, though.

Last Night's Tipple

The original Ridge wines from York Creek grapes were Petite Sirahs. Petite Sirah is frequently found in California planted in the same vineyards as Zinfandel (the same can be said of Carignane), and most California Zinfandels have at least some Petite Sirah included in the blend -- remember, a wine must only be 75% of a particular varietal to be labeled as that varietal in the United States, and most vintners like the tannic backbone and deep color that it gives to Zinfandel. It's probably called Petite Sirah because early grape growers thought that it had a genetic connection to Syrah, but in fact most Petite Sirah plantings have been identified as being Durif, a minor grape variety from the South of France. Several California wineries in addition to Ridge have bottled varietal Petite Sirah, but it usually does not make the most charming of wines. It certainly has not come into its own as a varietal like Zinfandel has.

In any event, the 2005 Ridge York Creek Zin has a healthy dollop of Petite Sirah -- 11%. I wish that I could tell you that I spotted the Petite Sirah character in this wine right off, but that would be a lie. About all I can claim is that I noticed that the wine was dark and that it fell far over on the Yum side of the Yum/Yuck scale.

Last Night's Tipple

Fritz Maytag and Paul Draper go way back. They met and befriended each other while students at Stanford University in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, they, along with another friend named Sam Armstrong, founded a non-profit organization named Pacific Development International to promote economic development in Central and South America. Eventually, by the late '60s, PDI was involved in winemaking in Chile. They gave up and ceased operations prior to the CIA-sponsored Pinochet coup in 1973 because the socialist Allende government, while interested in what PDI was trying to do, was more interested in taxing everything they made from winemaking away. Paul Draper went on to become the winemaker at Ridge. Fritz Maytag went on to buy the Anchor brewery in San Francisco and to help ignite the American craft brewing revolution. Oh, and to own some excellent vineyards, including York Creek in the Mayacamas Mountains in Napa County. Ridge has been making wine from York Creek grapes since 1971 and from York Creek Zinfandel since 1975.

The Ridge wines that I have had recently can be divided into two groups. In the first group are wines that are enjoyable but not really spectacular. The 2003 Independence School Zin, the 2006 Three Valleys Zin, and the 2005 Paso Robles Zin would all belong in this group. I don't think that they represent outstanding value, and I probably wouldn't buy them again. The second group of wines are really excellent -- balanced, concentrated, interesting, and just a joy to drink. The 2005 Geyserville and the 2005 Ponzo Vineyard Zins belong in this group, and so does the 2005 York Creek Zin. It's darker and more peppery than the other two in this grouping -- more blackberry than raspberry -- but it still is smooth and elegant and beautiful. I'd buy it again, even though it isn't exactly cheap.

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.

Last Night's Tipple

There is a good deal of independent vineyard ownership in California, meaning that it is very common for wineries not to own their own vineyards but instead to have to buy their fruit from the grape growers with the good grapes. There's a good side and a bad side to this practice for wineries, of course. They don't have to bear the risk of a particular vineyard having an awful harvest or being infested with pests or some similar disaster, and they're free to seek out better fruit any time they want to; however, they face the prospect of having to bid against other wineries for the best grapes. In practice, both the growers and the wineries try to mitigate the risk by entering into multiyear contracts with one another, but it's still possible for fruit from the same vineyard to go to multiple different wineries. And it was for Ponzo Vineyard in 2005. Some of those grapes went to Ridge to make the Ponzo Vineyard Zinfandel that I finished up last night, and some went to Nickel & Nickel, a boutique winery specializing in single-vineyard wines. I know this because I saw it on the shelf not two feet away from the Ridge version. I would be very curious to see how a different winery made out with fruit from the same vineyard, but, alas, I probably never will. The Nickel & Nickel Ponzo Vineyard Zin costs nearly $50 a bottle, which is too rich for my blood. I have long since realized that my palate isn't good enough to tell decent wine from really, really good wine, so I would likely feel ripped off by a wine that expensive, whether or not it was objectively better than the Ridge.

Anyway, this was still an extremely enjoyable wine the day after the bottle was opened. Fruity without being overpowering, powerful without being overly alcoholic, just a very pleasant drinking experience.

Last Night's Tipple

Ponzo Vineyard is located in the Russian River Valley in Sonoma County. Cousins Bob and Phil Ponzo have both sold grapes to Ridge over the years, but all the grapes from the 2005 Ponzo Vineyard Zin all come from Bob Ponzo's vineyard. Like all the Ridge wines that I have ever seen, this wine was fermented with natural yeasts, which is unusual, especially in California. That white haze that you see on the skin of grapes is yeast, and it is what fermented crushed grapes for thousands of years. The problem with doing it that way is that it is not entirely predictable. Sometimes, fermentation will not start. Sometimes, some of the yeasts will not be the ones that a winemaker would want and the resulting wine will have off flavors and aromas. The oenology school at the University of California at Davis, which trains a high percentage of the working winemakers in California and heavily influences many of the rest, teaches winemakers to inoculate the must with yeast. This introduces predictability. Paul Draper and the others at Ridge believe that this predictability comes at the cost of complexity and interest.

The winemakers' notes say that this Zinfandel "is a beautifully balanced, sensuous wine." I see the word "balanced" used to describe alcoholic beverages frequently, and I confess that I don't really know what is meant by it. I assume that it has a specific meaning, just as it does when it is used to refer to tailored garments, but hell if I know what that meaning is. I do know what sensuous means, though, and I agree that this wine is sensuous. It's silky and smooth and fruity and just plain good. I like this better than any Ridge wine that I have had since the '05 Geyserville that I had on Thanksgiving. It's not over-the-top with fruit and alcohol (even though it is 14.9% alcohol). It's just plain good.

Last Night's Tipple

I finished off the rest of the bottle of 2006 Ridge Three Valleys Zinfandel last night. I actually liked it better than I did on the night I opened it. The principal reason that I did, I think, was that I didn't have the ceiling fan going while I drank it. Let this be a lesson to you, Soletrain: ceiling fans are good for whiskey and very bad for wine.

You may be able to see from the picture to the left that the capsule on this wine is painted a gunmetal color, instead of Ridge's normal uncolored aluminum. I think that at one time the gunmetal capsule signified that a wine had been vinified at the Lytton Springs winery instead of the Monte Bello winery. I don't know if this is still the case, but this wine was indeed made at Lytton Springs.

Last Night's Tipple

All other things being equal, grapes from old vines are better than grapes from young vines. As they age, vines become less capable of supporting large amounts of fruit. The fruit that they can support, however, has more concentrated flavor; and just about every winemaker prefers grapes from old vines because of this. The problem is that old vines don't last forever. Eventually, even if they are perfectly healthy, they eventually stop producing enough fruit to be worthwhile; and there are many, many diseases that can afflict grapevines. What that means is that even the most conscientious grape grower must eventually rip out old vines and plant new ones. So what is a winery to do with grapes from young wines? Specifically, what is Ridge to do with grapes from young vines on the Lytton Estate? They aren't good enough to go into Lytton Springs, but they're too good just to sell off in bulk. When faced with similar problems, many other wineries have introduced lower-priced second (or even third) wines, and so it is with Ridge. Along with a relatively small number of grapes from other vineyards in Sonoma County, the grapes from the young vines of the Lytton Estate are used to make Ridge's Three Valleys Zinfandel (not actually labeled Zinfandel, but that's what it is). It has the lowest price of any of Ridge's offerings, and it's supposed to be the most accessible. It's also designed to be drunk young.

The 2006 version of this wine isn't bad, but it doesn't really have the charm of the other Ridge bottlings that I have had. It's to jammy and winey for my taste. It also has that stewed fruit quality that I don't really like much. For this kind of money (I paid $24, but it can be had for around $20), I'd much rather have a Ravenswood Sonoma County Zin and a ham sandwich.

2006 Ridge Three Valleys Zinfandel.

Last Night's Tipple

France has its appellations d’origine contrôlée (AOCs). Italy has its denominaziones di origine controllata (DOCs). The United States has its American Viticultural Areas (AVAs). All three regulate the areas in which grapes that go into designated wines may be grown: a Pauillac must be composed of grapes grown around the village of Pauillac in the Bordeaux area, a Chianti must be composed of grapes that are grown in a particular region in Tuscany, and a Lodi wine must be composed of grapes grown in the Lodi AVA near the city of Lodi, California. All three systems are hierarchical, too: the winemaker in Pauillac could label his wine as Pauillac or Haut-Médoc or Médoc or Bordeaux because Pauillac is in the Haut-Médoc AOC, which is in the Médoc AOC, which is in the Bordeaux AOC. Similarly, a winemaker using grapes grown near Healdsburg, California can label the resulting wine as Alexander Valley or Sonoma County or California. All three systems (and the others like it in other wine-producing countries) are intended as truth-in-labeling measures: you simply can't call a wine a Bordeaux if it isn't produced with Bordeaux grapes, and you can't say that a wine is from Lodi if it isn't.

There are a couple of key differences, however. The American AVA system only regulates the location that grapes can be grown. A grower in the Lodi AVA can grow whatever grapes he wants with whatever techniques he wants to whatever yields he wants and vinify it however he wants and still label it Lodi. Not so with the Pauillac grower. If he wants to label a red wine as Pauillac, it must be made from only Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, Merlot, and Petit Verdot grapes with certain yields and made with certain techniques. Furthermore, the finished wine must taste like a committee thinks a Pauillac wine should taste enough. In other words, the AOC system (and the DOC system, too) is designed not merely to guarantee the place of origin of a wine but also a wine's character. Secondly, it is rare for a winemaker to choose anything but the most specific AOC or DOC that a wine can qualify for. If a wine qualifies to be labeled a Pauillac, it would be exceedingly unusual for a winemaker to label it as a Haut-Médoc. That isn't always the case with AVAs. The Lodi AVA, for example, has a number of sub-AVAs (the Alta Mesa, Clements Hills, and Jahant AVAs, among several others); but it would be perfectly reasonable for a winemaker located in the Alta Mesa AVA (and making wines from grapes grown exclusively in that AVA) to choose to label his wines as Lodi. That's because consumers know Lodi and what to expect from wines bearing this appellation. Not so the Alta Mesa AVA.

I don't know if the Ravenswood Lodi Zinfandel could have qualified for another sub-AVA appellation, but it really doesn't matter. It wouldn't have fit in with the marketing plan for it to have been anything other than Lodi. As I have written previously, this is my least favorite of the three 2005 County Series Ravenswood Zins that I have tried (the other two being the Sonoma County and the Napa County). It's just too jammy and cooked-tasting. That's not to say that I didn't still enjoy it, just that I would pick either of the other two to buy again before this one.

Last Night's Tipple

Ravenswood, you will recall, has three different tiers of wines: the Vintners Blend range at the low end, the County series in the middle, and the vineyard-designated wines at the high end. There are five different Zinfandels in the County series: Sonoma County, Napa County, Mendocino County, Amador County, and Lodi. Lodi, you exclaim. Lodi isn't a county. Well, what can I tell you? Ravenswood Lodi Zinfandel is in the County series of wines. I haven't been able to find the Mendocino County and the Amador County Zins, so the 2005 Lodi will be the last of this series that I will have for a while.

Lodi is a mid-sized city located in San Joaquin County, in central California at approximately the same latitude as San Francisco Bay. It calls itself the Zinfandel Capital of the World, even though its grapes aren't the best-regarded in the state. Because it is inland, away from the coast, it lacks the cooling ocean breezes that help to moderate the weather in some other grape-growing regions in California. Consequently, Lodi grapes tend to be ripe, and wines made from them tend to be fruity and high in alcohol.

And, indeed, the Ravenswood Lodi Zin is fruity and high in alcohol. Of course, both the Ravenswood Sonoma and Napa Zins were fruity and high in alcohol, too. The fruit is darker in this one, though. I get plums and stewed fruit. It's not unpleasant, but I'd take the Sonoma Zin any day of the week. At least I don't have to have the Creedence Clearwater Revival song going through my head when I drink that.

Last Night's Tipple

I finished off the 2005 Ravenswood Napa County Zinfandel that I opened Friday last night, and my reaction to it is very similar to my reaction to the Ravenswood Sonoma County Zin on the second day: it ain't bad, but it isn't as good as it was on the first night. This is an example of why I am reluctant to order wines by the glass at restaurants -- if they have been open for much time at all, they likely aren't going to be nearly as good as they could be. I know that there are some restaurants that use an elaborate carbon-dioxide capping system to try to keep the wines fresh; but even if that method works, it's not exactly common. Restaurant markups on wine, particularly on wines by the glass, are typically extreme -- I wouldn't be surprised at all if this particular wine would go for $8 or $9 a glass at most restaurants, and the entire bottle retailed for a shade under $13. Why would I want to pay extortionate prices for stale wine?

Last Night's Tipple

You may have noticed that I am susceptible to enthusiasms when it comes to purchasing and consuming beer, wine, and liquor. I usually drink tonight something similar to what I drank last night. I finished a bottle of 2005 Ravenswood Sonoma County Zinfandel Thursday night, so what better to drink on Friday night than a bottle of 2005 Ravenswood Napa County Zinfandel?

I don't know if it is still the case, but for a long time, Sonoma County was regarded as something of the hick cousin to Napa County. Most of California's big-name, big-prestige, big-price wineries were located in Napa, while Sonoma retained something of its traditional rustic, agricultural character. It seems fitting, then, that Sonoma is more known for its Zinfandel than Napa is -- Zinfandel, with its big, bruising, slightly wild character is more of a match for rustic Sonoma than refined Napa. Of course, a lot of Zinfandel is grown in Napa, and any winery that makes an appreciable amount of the stuff will probably use at least some Napa grapes. And so it is with Ravenswood.

This wine is similar in style to the 2005 Sonoma County wine that I drank earlier in the week: it's big, oaky, tannic, and fruity. But whereas the fruit that I got from the Sonoma County wine was raspberry (doused with a heavy dose of cream), here I get darker fruit -- maybe cherries or blackberries or something like that. After some time in the glass, it starts to get lighter and creamier; but it certainly is different from the Sonoma County version. I prefer the Sonoma County, but this is pretty enjoyable, too.

Last Night's Tipple

I finished the bottle of 2005 Ravenswood Sonoma County Zinfandel last night. Alas, it wasn't as exuberantly fruity and intense as it had been Wednesday night. As is often the case, a day open in the bottle did it no favors. It improved as I got down to the very end of the bottle, but it was no match for what it had originally been.

I typically use those little Vac-u-vin rubber stoppers that allow you to pump the air out of the bottle and form something of a vacuum when I have a portion of a bottle left that I'm not going to finish that day. It works reasonably well, I suppose, better than just putting the cork back in the bottle upside down. But I don't think that I've ever had a wine that tasted as good on the second day as on the first. Air just doesn't do anything positive for wine in the long run. I read about wines that have to be decanted and left to sit for hours before they begin to open up. I evidently haven't been drinking that kind of wine.

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Back in the late '80s and early '90s, wine critics and wine consumers commonly referred to the three Rs of Zinfandel: Ridge, Rosenblum, and Ravenswood. The first and the last of that group were most often mentioned together because they provided a study in contrasts: Ridge made wines noted for their restraint and elegance (and the fact that they were -- and are -- aged in American oak). Ravenswood isn't like that.

Ravenswood is the creation of Joel Peterson. Peterson is a baby boomer whose parents were both chemists. Peterson pere was also a major figure in the Bay Area wine connoisseur community, and Peterson fils has been tasting wines since he was 10 years old. When he was a boy, his father would measure out the wines that he served him and then measured what was in Joel's spitoon after the tasting. If the two measurements didn't match, there would be hell to pay. Joel went on to get a degree in molecular biology and to work as a researcher in a hospital. But he retained an interest in wine, and he started Ravenswood to be something of a sidelight and hobby in 1976. Commercial success and critical acclaim -- not least by Robert Parker of The Wine Advocate -- in the mid to late 1980s eventually allowed him to quit his day job and to become Ravenswood's full-time winemaker. Peterson chose "No Wimpy Wines" for Ravenswood's motto, and he has made wines in keeping with that motto from the beginning. They're big, highly-extracted, packed with flavor and tannin, and aged in French oak. To call Ravenswood the anti-Ridge would be misleading: both wineries believe and have believed in natural winemaking with the highest-quality fruit available. It's just that the wines that Peterson believes to be ideal are very different from the wines Paul Draper, the winemaker at Ridge, believes to be so.

Ravenswood went public in 1999 and was purchased by beverage Goliath Constellation Brands in 2001. That fact hasn't helped Ravenswood with wine connoisseurs, who tend to be very suspicious of the vinous products of big corporations. They also don't tend to like that Ravenswood has become ubiquitous over the past ten or twelve years, primarily because of the Vintner's Blend range, which is responsible for 800,000 cases of Ravenswood's 1 million cases sold per year. Vintner's Blend wines are simple, pleasant, and cheap, and they can be found anywhere. Familiarity breeds contempt. But if you read reviews of Ravenswood's single-vinyard wines, particularly of the flagship Old Hill Vineyard Zinfandel, it's evident that critics still think that Peterson makes some excellent wines. It's just that Ravenswood has long since ceased to be the Flavor of the Month.

Ravenswood's County series of wines lies between the Vintner's Blend range and the single-vinyard range. There are five Zinfandels in the current 2005 vintage: Sonoma County, Napa County, Amador County, Mendocino County, and Lodi. Since Ravenswood is a Sonoma County winery, and since some of their best-known and most-respected wines are made from Sonoma County grapes, I decided to give the Sonoma County bottling a try first. Wow. If any wine can be said to have "hedonistic gobs of fruit," this is it: lots and lots of sweet raspberries. It actually tastes like raspberries and cream, the cream coming from the French oak, I would assume. At 15% alcohol, it packs quite an alcoholic punch. It's also pretty tannic, but there's so much fruit that I didn't really notice the tannin much. I like it. A lot. Especially at $13 a bottle.

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I finished off the bottle of 1998 Ridge Lytton Springs last night, and my reactions to it are similar to my reactions from Monday night. I can't really call it good, and I don't think the extra day open benefited it at all. With some time in the glass, there is some fruit that is nice enough, but there's not that much sensual pleasure to be had on this. I should have opened this two or three years ago at least.

And let this be a lesson to you, wine lovers: lots of wine, including lots of good wine from excellent makers, doesn't really benefit much from bottle age. Like just about every beer, a lot of wine starts to deteriorate from the minute it's bottled. I don't know if that's what happened with this Lytton Springs, but it sure seems to me that it started to deteriorate at some point between 1999 and when I opened it.

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At some point in 2000, I purchased a bottle of 1998 Ridge Lytton Springs. (The picture to the right is doubly wrong: it's a 2005 bottle, and it's a split instead of a standard 750 ml one.) I imagine that I was planning on keeping it for a special occasion or something. Regardless, I forgot about it for a number of years, which is how it came to be sitting in my wine rack in late 2007. Lytton Springs is one of Ridge's two flagship Zinfandel blends (along with Geyserville), although it is not labeled as Zinfandel. The 1998 is 77% Zinfandel, 16% Petite Sirah, 2% Carignane, 4% Mataro, and 1% Alicante Bouschet, according to the label, and it is 14.3% alcohol. The label also says that

Intense fruit, a rich structure, and firm tannins characterize this lovely vintage, which will be at its best over the next five to six years.

The wine was bottled in November, 1999, so math indicates that Paul Draper thought that it would last until late 2005. That was two years ago. And it's not like I have stored this in ideal conditions. There is nothing to do but drink it now and see how it is.

I suspect that it has seen better days. When I first poured it, the dominant aroma was of a box of Band-Aids. Yes, Band-Aids. I don't know what wine-taster-ese is for that smell, but it wasn't the world's most appealing. There was no fruit that I could detect: just Band-Aids and tannin. At one point, I almost poured it out, but I decided to persevere. I'm glad I did. With some time in the glass and vigorous swirling, it improves considerably. I started to get some fruit, and the Band-Aid smell dissipated. Still, it is dominated by dark, dank odors. I can't say that I actually liked it, but it wasn't revolting. Oh, how I wish that I had consumed this three or four years ago.