2004 Monte Bello Estate Vineyard, bottled April 2006
76% CABERNET SAUVIGNON,13% MERLOT, 8% PETIT VERDOT, 3% CABERNET FRANC
Winter rains were scarce this year, and total rainfall down twenty-five percent. Budbreak came early, but bloom was late, delayed by cold April weather. Having set a small crop for the third consecutive year, the vines required little thinning. Harvest began on schedule; most parcels were picked in the first two weeks of October. Four days later, heavy rains drenched the remaining grapes—a quarter of the crop. Fortunately, sun and wind dried the clusters fully before the next storm, and we finished harvest with no damage to the fruit. The forty small lots fermented to dryness on their natural yeasts in nine days on average. Twothirds of them completed natural malolactic in barrel, and remained on the lees for five months. The rest finished in tank, and were racked off their lees to barrel within one month. In a series of tastings conducted from late January through March, we selected seventeen lots for the first Monte Bello assemblage. Another was included in May, one more in December. Eighteen months in barrel has begun to integrate the firm tannins and rich texture of this fine vintage. Unusually appealing as a young wine, it will gain further depth and complexity over the next fifteen to twenty years. PD
Paul Draper has made an incredible 45 vintages at his famous winery on the Montebello Ridge. In addition to his considerable winemaking responsibilities he continues to maintain a punishing schedule of tastings and visits in the US and abroad. He is aided and abetted by Don Riesen who famously started out driving tractors for Ridge in the '60s. He traveled everywhere he could promoting the wines and is now President of the winery. The humorous interplay between the two of them, resulting from three decades working together, is one of the many rewarding features of any visit to Ridge.
The Ridge wines have long represented the very finest in both upper-end quality and value for money. The style of Paul Draper’s wines has always wowed fans of both classic European wines and big fans of the New World. Very few, if any, winemaker’s can lay claim to this. No surprise that Monte Bello Cabernet has been chosen as the greatest wine in the world in separate decades and Paul himself has been both winemaker of the year and Decanter Magazine winemaker of the year.