Some Ridge N/A UK wines.

 

Always Ridge fans we have looked on in envy as their newsletters announced regularly the release of all sorts of goodies which never reach the UK market. With Xmas coming up we thought it a good idea to try to get our hands on some of these. As you can see from the above we bought

A Carignane (sic) from the Buchignane Ranch

Their Grenache Blanc

Their Gonzalves Mataro (Mourvedre)

Corralitos Pint Noir

Frediani vineyard Valdiguie

Zinfandel from the Jimsomare vineyard

Ridge has searched out old vines in what you could call heritage vineyards far and wide in Calfornia to make what we described as 'Third Way' wines in our original post on Ridge following our memorable visit there in 2012 (see our post on 17th May that year).  By Third Way we meant vine age in addition to terroir and winemaking. The usual conversation centres around whether the wine is made in the vineyard or in the cellar. Ridge adds vine age to that. We argued that by adding vine age to the mix, Ridge achieves a similarity of style across their wines.

Perhaps this softened the distinctions between some of the grape varietis - Carignane, Pinot Noir and Zinfandel especially. The Mataro and above all Valdiguie stood out more sharply. We haven't tried the Grenache Blanc yet but look forward to that as we are great fans of that.

Valdiguie was not much more exciting than a couple of other Californian examples we have tasted before. There is nothing negative about his grape but not much to get excited about either and if Ridge can't alter that then there is probably not a great future for Valdiguie.

On a practical note, Ridge has a wonderfully effficient shipping office  led by Cathy Baker who take care of exports but this comes at a price, naturally. Wierdly, our half dozen bottles reached us without any tax demands but a couple of days later we got a bill from Fedex which came as a surprise.