The California Wine Lover's Guide

55 bottles that will tell you everything about the past, present, and future of California wine

- Ray Isle

A California Icon

Paul Draper & Ridge Vineyards

UP BEHIND THE TOWN OF CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA, there's a long, steep, winding road. If you follow it, you will eventually come to a graceful redwood building. From there, you can see, far down below, distant and silent, the tech fervor of Silicon Valley. This is Ridge Vineyards.

Not long ago, I went there to chat with Ridge's chairman emeritus, Paul Draper, an icon of California winemaking whose career more or less encompasses the entire modern era of California wine, as does Ridge itself. The winery was founded in 1959 by a trio of Stanford engineers; Draper joined them in 1969.

Things were different then. "There wasn't remotely as much interest in wine in the U.S. at that time," Draper recalls. “And California wine from the 1940s, '50s, and then '60s, none of them were as complex or would age as well as the best Bordeaux. I thought, 'Jesus, are we at that much of a disadvantage that we just can't do that?' But when I came up here, I sat down and was given a taste of the '62 and '64 that Dave [Bennion, Ridge's original winemaker] had made with his partners, and they were two of the best California wines I had ever had in my life. Wow. Right there. And so I said to myself, 'Well, for Christ's sake, you can do it in California.""