Martin Ray, post-1976

Anyone familiar with what happened to Martin Ray wines after Ray’s death in 1976? Have seen bottles about from '77-80 but was wondering who made the wine and what experiences folks have had.



In 1942 Ray sold the winery, vineyards and inventory to Seagrams, but he retained the company title and changed the name to the Martin Ray Winery. With the proceeds of the sale he purchased the adjoining mountain and continued to produce the finest quality 100% varietal Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon. In the late 1960s he formed a partnership to develop the surrounding area, but the partnership soured and Ray ended up losing control of the winery and all but 5 acres to what became Mount Eden Vineyards. He named his remaining 5 acres Peter Martin Ray Vineyard after his stepson. Production continued, after his death in 1976, into the early 1980s, headed by Peter and his widow Eleanor. In addition to estate grapes, they purchased high quality grapes from Stelzner (Stag’s Leap) and Winery Lake (Carneros) vineyards.

The label was defunct until 1990 when it was acquired by Courtney Benham in Sonoma. They continue to make a range of wines under the Martin Ray label “with the goal of creating wines whose quality would make Martin Ray himself proud” but very few of the wines are from Santa Cruz Mountains fruit.

From http://scmwine.wikispaces.com/MARTIN+RAY

Ceritas made Peter Martin Ray Chardonnay now for the past two releases. It is knock your socks off fantastic Chardonnay.

And Cabernet!

Also the Arnot Roberts Peter Martin Ray Pinot is outstanding.

The last vintage of Peter’s wines I’ve seen was '82. Generally exceptional wines.

Duane Cronin sourced from the vineyard, making an outstanding SVD Pinot. (I think he source Cab and Chard from there, too, for his SCM blends.) After Duane fell ill, some others sourced the fruit, but I didn’t (knowingly) encounter any of those. Then in '06 Downhill Wines made a Chard and Pinot, and continued to make the Pinot through '08 (still available) - recommended. Also in '08 only, Ian Brand got some of the Pinot for Nicholson Vineyards.

As a baby, the Arnot-Roberts PMR PN is a travesty of whole cluster excess blanketing a wonderfully expressive vineyard. I hope that resolves with age, but as someone who’s tasted 3 decades of Pinot from this wonderfully expressive site it comes across as a poor winemaking decision.

To add on to what Wes posted, Soquel Vineyards was taking the Pinot and, I think, Chard after after Cronin stopped taking the fruit. The Downhill Wines are a bargain if you run across them. Unless the PMR vineyard has been replanted it is probably the oldest PN vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains but I’m sure about this.

I can’t add anything to what’s already been posted about the vineyard but I can say that one of my most memorable wines was a 1978 Martin Ray Cab. It was with dinner with several friends in D.C. around 1994 or 1995 and I remember it well.
Cheers, Gary

Wow the 2011 Arnot-Roberts PMR was one of the best new world Pinots I have ever had and my impressions where share by a few other serious Burgundy lovers who tried it with me. I will say the 2012 was not as good but it was also very young. I clearly do not have the experience you have with the site but I have tried several wines from it.

The Arnot-Roberts PMR is great. I don’t quite put it at the top for new world Pinot but it is still up there for me. Meanwhile, that Ceritas PMR Chard is insanely good, especially in 2012.

I’d say that the PMR vineyard fruit is now in the hands of two of the most talented producers in California… Hard to see that as a bad thing.

A wonderful book of the life and legend of Martin Ray is “Vineyards in the Sky” written by Eleanor Ray with Barbara Marinacci.

Roy Brady on Martin Ray;

Martin Ray was a crook, or, better, a con artist. I don’t think that he conned people primarily to make money, but his deepest satisfaction came from conning them carefully, thoughtfully, and exquisitely, it was an artistic performance. He was also, at his best, a great winemaker. Perhaps he could have been as great a winemaker as he painted himself to be, but the joyous scalawag kept breaking through. His motto might have been, I could not love thee wine so much, loved I not conning more. He would rather make a mediocre wine and cause people to beg for an allotment at an outrageous price than to make a great wine and sell it at a merely healthy price.

My acquaintance with Martin Ray can be dated precisely. I met him on September 8, 1955 and last saw him on August 11, 1959, a period of just under four years. I initiated the acquaintance because of what I heard of him as a great winemaker, and he brought it to an end when he finally realized that I was adamant about not investing in his Mt. Eden “Chateau.” I spoke to him on the phone a few times after that and got occasional pronouncements for some time after, but I was not to see him again in the remaining sixteen years of his life.
Martin was a colorful character when California badly needed one. He was a boon to the industry, though many in it would have preferred him to have been a boon elsewhere. He was flamboyant, vocal, outrageous, bombastic, imperious, opinionated, unreasonable, where others, always excepting André Tchelistcheff, were comparatively colorless and reticent.

He spoke of almost everyone else with contempt. He could be very funny. The first time my wife met Martin we had lunch with the Rays on their verandah looking over the vineyard. He was in top form. He brought undisgorged champagne from the cellar. He had practiced the old trick, probably not used by anyone else in 150 years. The knack is to loosen the cork with the bottle held upside down, then suddenly swing it upright, and exactly at the right moment release the cork, blowing the years’ lees out with a little wine. A fraction of a second too late and the lees are mixed with the wine, a fraction of a second too soon and much wine is lost. Everybody else freezes the neck of the bottle so that the lees are trapped in a small plug of ice which is much easier to remove. Martin certainly did that when he didn’t have an audience. As with everything, his disgorging was flamboyant. Martin stood at the edge of the verandah and fired cork and lees explosively over the vineyard. I got a picture of him in the act. He decanted his old red wines while talking over his shoulder so he couldn’t see what was going on. Again he must have practiced until he got it just right. The show was everything, and he was never out of the spotlight. Everything he did was special. If he served you a lamb chop he recited the genealogy of that particular lamb back to the time of Noah. One time we drove down his mountain to get some “fresh” corn for dinner. Asked if the corn was fresh, the mortal who grew it said, “Oh, yes sir, it was picked this morning.” Martin bellowed, “This morning! You get out in that field and get me some fresh corn.”
Everyone, and they were many, who had any dealings with Martin Ray had stories about him. I thought to collect them and was promised copies of letters and notes, but to the last person they fell mute. The reason, I surmise, is that after thinking about it they felt used and abused by Martin, and in consequence felt foolish. Not a few were overtly hostile from the start.

I am certainly not particularly wise in the ways of the world, but I never had any illusions about Martin. I thoroughly enjoyed him; he is a splendid character to have in one’s memory, but he was not one to have business dealings with, and in the end his friendship proved to depend on that.
Martin came down from his mountain about once a year to make what other winemakers would call a sales trip. With Martin it was more of a progress of largesse-granting. Certain retail merchants and individuals of sufficient distinction, probity, and eminence (some might add gullibility) were granted the privileges of buying strictly limited quantities of Martin Ray wines at set prices. If they hesitated it was implied that they would be banished to spend the rest of their lives drinking second growths. I once asked him how he determined the quantity of champagne to make each year, expecting to hear about rigorous selection of grapes, casks that didn’t measure up, and suchlike. In a moment of rare candor Martin lifted his glass and said with a grin, “I decide how much I can drink and how much I can sell; that’s what I make.”
Martin evidently didn’t think much of Southern California, but that is where the money and the gullibility were, so he came. Every time I visited his place I would invite him to dinner at mine. Finally in 1959 he called, and in tones suitable for announcing, “I have risen,” he let it be known that he was available for dinner the following day. He could not have chosen a worse time. We were on the verge of moving, nearly everything was packed, and there was no possibility of having dinner at home. Somehow taking the Rays to a restaurant never even crossed my mind. I called a vinously-inclined friend, explained the situation, and he generously agreed to have the dinner at his place. Since my new house did not yet have a cellar I had stored a good deal of my wine with this friend, so it was available.But what does one serve Martin Ray? It is among my most firmly held principles not to serve a winemaker his own wine, and Martin was openly contemptuous of all his California colleagues. It would have to be French wine and appropriately big names. Martin liked to compare his own wines with the greats: Lafite, Latour, and Mouton-Rothschild for Bordeaux; for Burgundy it was Romanée Conti, Montrachet, and Corton Charelmagne, especially the wines of Louis Latour. He sneered at lesser wines, perhaps because he didn’t know anything about them. He did acknowledge the Ficklins and always spoke of them with genuine affection and admiration, tones rarely heard in his voice. He admired Walter’s gentle salesmanship, so different from his own; he approved of Walt, Jr.’s care of the vines, and he spoke well of David’s winemaking. He could, of course, afford to, since he and David made entirely different wines.
When I called to tell him the place, he proposed to bring “a little champagne.” I protested, but he insisted and arrived with an ice chest and three bottles of his truly fine Madame Pinot 1955, certainly the best California champagne of that time and, I rather think, of this time too.
Martin soon absorbed his statutory bottle and continued to glance thirstily about. We had the following, and consider that there were six of us: Ch. Haut Brion 1920, 1918, 1904 (which included Martin’s and my birth years); Ch. Climens 1937; Ch. d’Yquem 1937, 1921; Gaston Briand Grade Fin Champagne 1904.
Martin tucked in and did his duty by everything offered. I was happy to see that his strictures against strong drink did not encompass Cognac. The dinner broke up after midnight, and it was a foregone conclusion that Martin and Eleanor would stay the night. No, Martin suddenly announced that it was time to go home, and nothing would do but that they get in the car and start the four-hundred-mile drive to Saratoga. He couldn’t stay put. Eleanor was driving.
I happened to be at their place the following week. Martin went on about how much they had enjoyed the dinner, how fine the wines were, how charming my friends were, and so on.Finally he got to it. “Well, uh, you know uh, you really ought to say something to your friend, John, about how he holds back on the wine; doesn’t realize how thirsty a man gets. I was thirsty and I could see you were having trouble getting him to open the bottles.” He had drunk over two bottles of wine and a substantial amount of Cognac at the dinner, but he continued, “We got out to the coast highway, and after little while I couldn’t stand it any longer. I said, ‘Stop the car, Eleanor, God damn it, I’ve got to have a little champagne to carry my home.’ So I got a bottle out of the ice chest and drank it. I felt better and we went along home.”
Only André Tchelitcheff was making comparable Cabernets in the forties and his name did not yet have the magic it later acquired. When I came to California Martin had a 1947 Cabernet at $3, and it presently went to $6, an enormous price when B.V. Private Reserve was selling for $1.82 and easy to find. Martin clearly recognized that only that which costs money is valued. Very early on he decided that if his wines were to be accepted as the best they would have to be the most expensive. Of course, he never put that way. His argument always was that his wines were the most expensive because they were the finest. The pricing policy not only convinced the public; in the end it convinced Martin. It became essential to him to have the most costly wine. When Joe Heitz put out a $27 Chardonnay it was absolutely inevitable that Martin would top it, and by a handsome margin. He rammed a $50 Chardonnay down the public throat and remained the king to the end.
Martin was highly unusual in his generation of winemakers in that he really enjoyed wine. I think he rally did, though, as with everything Martin did, it is hard to still a small nagging doubt. Could it have been just another facet of the great act? I don’t think so. I saw him drink too much wine with too much gusto.
Those of his generation did not drink wine. Most made little pretense of liking it, but those who pretended had little success in doing so. They sipped too slowly, their glasses never need to be refilled, they lost their glasses, they chose the sweetest wines going, and they switched to Bourbon as soon as they thought is safe. I was shocked when I first attended a meeting of the American Society of Enologists almost twenty years ago. It seemed that Bourbon was the official drink of the meeting. At dinner one bottle of wine on a table of eight would like as not go unfinished. Of course, I am perennially naïve. When I first entered a university I assumed that it would be a community of scholars.
Martin went in for heavy Cabernets and didn’t care how long they took to age. In youth his 1946 seemed impossibly black and stiff, but it came around and peaked before it was twenty. If such a wine were put out today the seers would announce that no living person would see its prime. As a winemaker he was too erratic and quixotic for complete success. His champagnes were far beyond any others in California, but his Pinot Noirs were notably less successful, and he seldom made good white wines. Still, he never admitted to making a wine that was less than superb. It was an article of faith that all Ray wines were fine. If a customer complained that that a wine was bad he attributed it to the customer’s ignorance. In one incident a customer bought a case of Ray wine from a retailer and found it bad. He returned it to the dealer who proposed to return it to Ray. Ray recommended that he the customer apologize to the dealer for his misguided notions.
I drank many Martin Ray wines of the vintages from 1946 through 1955 and a good deal of the unvintaged La Montaña Cabernet from the old Rixford Vineyard at Woodside. I had a least two different bottling of the latter, one of which was supposed to go back to 1938, but I never had too much confidence in what he said about his wines. He never used an appellation more specific than California. I once asked him why with all his talk of standards, the chaine d’or, and all that, why he was so vague on his labels. He gave out with some rigamarole about the primacy of his name and so on but didn’t answer the question. I think he just wanted to give himself the maximum leeway. As long as there was nothing in writing he could change his story and claim you had misunderstood the first time. The earliest wine I tasted was a Cabernet Sauvignon 1936 with the Paul Masson brand name. His own name was in small print, but the curious thing was that he had simply lifted the design of the old Schloss Johannisberg label – a picture of the River Rhine on the California red wine. When I had it it was thirty years old, sound but too old to judge.

I never saw a wine of his from the latter fifties and do not know why. I tasted a good many wines of the sixties and seventies, but they lacked the old character.
Martin was a great storyteller and a freehanded host. How he found out so much as he presumed to know while perching on his mountaintop in splendid isolation was a mystery. He was always supplied with stories to the discomfiture of those who had displeased him. The late John Esquin, a German who founded Esquin Imports in San Francisco, had somehow aroused Martin’s ire. One evening Martin produced a richly textured yarn about Esquin’s true role during World War II as a Nazi courier between Mexico and California. That same evening he argued that a certain eminent wine man was as queer as a three-dollar bill. Men how had failed him were often found to be queer. But his story-telling genius did not require exotic fare or thrive. One day before dinner with the champagne flowing freely he convulsed the party with a history of his pyorrhea. His dentist told him he had it, and said, “Now, here is what I’m going to do.” Martin, his voice rising in his best old Testament style, said, “No! You’ll tell me what you can do; then I’ll tell you what you’re going to do.”
It is difficult to say much about Martin’s relations with people other than myself. Never in all my visits to his place did he have another guest, except for my wife on one occasion. Yet it was apparent from his conversation that he knew, or, more likely, in most cases, he had known nearly everybody of any consequence in California wine.
All of his relationships appeared to be doomed in one way or another, as ours was. Time and again it appeared that he had formerly been on good terms with someone and then broke off. I think particularly of one eminent wine man whom Martin sometimes mentioned with considerable warmth. They had evidently once traveled through the wine country as boon companions, but then one night Martin told one of his richly detailed stories about the same man. As always, the story was hilarious if outrageous. Martin’s humor had the ability to hold incredulity at bay for the moment, but later on wondered how many of his extravagant charges could be true, or, if true, how Martin could have learned such details.
Martin was on the great drinkers of his time. He would have jeered at the notion of moderation, had anybody been injudicious enough to recommend it to him. Whenever I dined with him and Eleanor à trios, he began with two bottles of his champagne, followed by a white and two reds. He was able to talk, drink, and eat simultaneously to a degree that I have not seen equaled. Once, when I had been invited to dinner, I happened to arrive in late afternoon on an exceptionally hot day. Martin greeted me on the wide verandah that ran around three sides of his house. He had taken off his shirt and his belly glistened in the lowering sun. After a few minutes he said, “Do you think it’s too early for champagne?”
I suggested that in view of the heat some more cooling drink would be good, perhaps iced tea. That was fine and he jumped up to take action at once. In the kitchen he remembered some lemons he had just got, and said, “Let’s have some lemonade!” With that he dumped about half a bushel of lemons on the counter, took down a gigantic pitcher, and exclaimed, “God damn it, Roy, I don’t like to drink a little bit of anything.”
That hot day was the last time I saw Martin or Eleanor. Because of the heat dinner was served amidst the cass in the cellar under the house. It was delectably cool down there but the unfortunate Eleanor had to go up to the kitchen from time to time. Only the three of us were there. The dinner was good, as it always was – simple, well prepared, and of the best ingredients. Everything served at the Ray table had to be of the best, naturally. We began with two bottles of Martin’s Madame Pinot champagne 1955 – excellent at cellar temperature. We had a Montrachet 1955 of the Marquis de Laguiche and a Corton Charlemagne 1956 from Louis Latour. As always Martin served wine from those he considered his peers, and the 1956 was to show that a great winemaker could make fine wine even in a mediocre year. It was rather good but scarcely fine. The first red was Martin’s Pinot Noir 1954, Third Crush. He allowed the grape to remain on the vines for three weeks after the regular picking, producing an exceedingly heavy wine with 15% alcohol and a slightly cooked taste I didn’t care for. Louis Latour’s 1955 Chambertin was a lot better. We finished with Martin’s 1952 Cabernet Sauvignon, another huge wine, so we had seven bottles, several them high in alcohol. Martin drank deep and fast. It was foolish to try to keep up with him but difficult to resist when he was enthusiastically pouring. He must had had between three and four bottles, I between two and three.

Around the winter of 1958-59 Martin began to drop hints about a vast and vital project he was working on, something very important and very select. And, for the present, mysterious, it appeared. One day after Martin had few subscribers signed up for the project, the Mt. Eden scheme, he began to tell me who they were and what splendid people they were. When he finished I remarked that I was surprised that Burgess Meredith was not yet in.
“Oh no!” he exclaimed, “We can’t take him in.”
“What do you mean, you can’t take him in? You’re always telling me what a great friend he is, and a great judge of wine, and all that. I thought he’d probably be the first one in.”
“Yes, that’s all true, but he’s a bachelor.”
“A bachelor?”
“That’s the trouble. You never know when the nicest fella in the world it going to marry some God damned bitch you can’t stand.”

Thanks for sharing Roy’s take on MartinRay, Leo. It pretty much matches everything I’d heard about Martin.
I, of course, followed… NOT !!. But wish I’d had. Did have a few btls of his old Pinots I picked up at Beltramo’s.
Tom

Tom - how were the old Pinots?

I had an excellent bottle of the 1979 Santa Cruz Mountain Cabernet last month

OK, Noah…just that. This was back in the mid-late '70’s and the Pinots were of the '50-'60’s era. Think I had two of them.
Very expensive on the shelves at Beltramos. They were good, as I recall, but not worth the tariff. I had a BV Pinot from the
mid-'60’s I thought was far better.
Tom

The Martin Rays that have been on Winebid for weeks that I have sampled are all in excellent shape. I’m surprised by which I like and which I don’t, which has nothing to do with age but with the original wine. Haven’t tried a pinot.

Which ones have you opened?

Leo, Thanks for the great read. Pardon my ignorance but who is Roy Brady? Quite the storyteller in his own right.

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I’m not Leo, but am a huge Roy Brady fan. I like to think of him as the Tom Hill of his era, wading through the minor ocean of wine that was the California wine scene at that time. Roy came from the midwest (IIRC) and moved to Southern California to teach at Cal State Northridge. While in Chicago, he got bitten by the wine bug and delved pretty deeply into the gospel according to Frank Schoonmaker. This meant that he and his wife spent a lot of his salary buying top-level Bordeaux and Burgundy (affordable in those days) and somehow became acquainted with what was happening in California.

This was back in the 1950s, so the boutique scene hadn’t really started, but on trips to Northern California Brady dove right into it, spending time visiting all of the then - au courant wineries and meeting the winemakers, owners, and salespeople who have since become legends. Along the way he began to write about wine and also amassed a huge collection of wine labels, eventually left to UC Davis, along with his tasting notes and a substantial wine book collection.

I first learned of him via articles written for magazines such as New West and for various wine journals. Back in the mid-1970s he also co-wrote (with Colman Andrews) a wine column in LA Magazine under the nom de plume of “Van Delaney,” and I’d have to say that this was one of the most influential wine writing in terms of getting me interested in wine. They focused on boutique California wines but also did some really good reporting on other wines from around the world. It was here that I first learned about Madeira – it was intriguing to still be able to buy wine from the 1700s in the 1970s; sadly, it was almost $50 per bottle and I decided that this was way too much to spend for dessert wine that wasn’t really even sweet. newhere I know better these days…

About 10 years ago Darrel Corti did a small (250 copies) private publishing of “The Brady Book” that compiled a varied selection of Roy’s writing. It’s a fascinating, one of my favorite wine books not only for its writing, but it’s beautifully thought out in terms of its layout, printing and overall feel. Reading it is like taking a time machine 50 years in the past and experiencing what the wine world was like at that time. roy Brady had a gift for explaining to the reader what it was that turned him on to a wine. The Brady Book was somewhere north of $100 on release but copies, when they appear, usually sell for considerably more. At the price of a bottle of an average Grand Cru Burgundy from an okay vintage, it’s well-worth adding to your collection if you stumble across a copy, just to add some context to where wine is today. The book offers a glimpse of a time when wine was just a really interesting beverage for discerning (and curious) drinkers, before it became a commodity.

And now back to Martin Ray…

DF

Hey Dan! Thanks for the 411! Roy (and his writing) was a bit before my wine epiphany. I’d love to get ahold of the Brady Book, sounds like a great read.

Also, welcome to Berserkers, nice to see you post here.

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