In 1959, four engineers from Stanford purchased Ridge Vineyards – a series of wooded limestone terraces established in the 1880s high above the Pacific – to make bottles at the weekends for their own consumption. By 1969, they had recruited Paul Draper, a philosophy graduate and non-interventionist winemaker who had recently returned from Chile. The rest is vinous history: Draper would become one of the best-known ambassadors for California viticulture (overseeing 47 vintages) and establish Ridge as a benchmark winery, not just for the New World but for collectors everywhere. If the US had a formal classification system, Ridge would be a First Growth.
