RIDGE Lytton Springs Turns 50

JancisRobinson.com

August 2024

This fall, we’ll release the 2022 vintage of Lytton Springs, which marks 50 years since our first bottling in 1972. To kick off the celebration, we invited a group of journalists and sommeliers to the winery to taste vintages of Lytton Springs dating back to 1974. In attendance was Alder Yarrow, writer for JancisRobinson.com.

Yarrow does a wonderful job at summarizing the early years of Lytton Springs’ rich history, from the moment Paul Draper saw the vineyard to the handshake agreement that started it all and the eventual purchase of the Lytton Springs estate. He goes on to explain the iconic vineyard’s characteristics and the resulting wines.

A Classic Blend from a Storied Site

The vineyard is farmed organically, and after making a vine-by-vine map of the estate, Ridge has dutifully done its replanting of dead vines on a one-for-one basis to keep both the varietal mix as well as the vineyard layout exactly as originally planted.

The winemaking approach and techniques for Lytton Springs have changed little over its 50 years. Without exception, every vintage sees the separate vineyard blocks destemmed and lightly crushed and then fermented separately in tanks with native yeasts.

There’s no given recipe for the final Lytton Springs blend. While certain vineyard blocks are reliably excellent from year to year, the winemaking team begins each vintage with a blank slate, assembling the final blend on a block-by-block basis purely based on taste, adhering to Paul Draper’s famous philosophy that the winemaker’s most important tool is the wine glass.

I’ve been tasting Lytton Springs for perhaps 20 years now, and have come to adore its iconic manifestation of what I believe to be the underappreciated charms of old-school California field blends... Whether through happenstance or truly enlightened agronomy, the Zinfandel-dominated blends of vineyards like Lytton Springs frequently seem to yield wines that are more than the sum of their parts.

Indeed, Lytton Springs has offered a remarkably consistent expression of place for decades, and one with an admirable capacity to age, as some of the tasting notes below will demonstrate. I’ve now had the good fortune to taste the 1984, 1999 and 2009 vintages twice in recent years, and both times I have marvelled at the vibrancy they retain even as their primary fruit gives way to a meatier, more savoury expression.

Summary of Scores