I certainly hope that’s the case for the 2024 MB. It’s such a special vineyard, capable of making the best cabernet/Bx blend in the world. The terroir is utterly perfect and there is no other place on this planet that can produce something so distinct. I’m just tasting through my 2013’s-all the wines produced from MB that vintage (I will be publishing those notes in a separate post) and the wines all share such a beautiful aroma-minerality, sensuousness and fine tannins. The acidity, big tannins, and intense flavors are what makes Monte Bello such an amazing wine with the best age-ability. It is a very tricky vineyard to navigate winemaking. Picking decisions were always agonized over. I would find myself out every morning, walking blocks, sampling grapes, tasting, visually noting the vines’ appearance-looking for their signs of being ready for harvest. What I’ve always known about Monte Bello is that harvests completed before the autumnal equinox did not result in wine with deep color, ripe tannins, and did not age very well. For thick-skinned, heavily pigmented varietals, the later season ripening has the sun angle lower in the sky, less daylight, less UV exposure. This triggers the vine to begin its final stages of color development, tannin ripening-lignification of the seeds. When walking the blocks, you can observe this change-the basal leaves have yellowed and form a backdrop to the fruit zone. Yellow-Purple are complementary and if I was a wild animal cruising about looking to eat grapes-those vines would be where I’d go as the fruit is clearly on display and looking delicious. Being a winemaker, I’m looking at those vines, tasting the grapes and finding excellent flavor intensity, crunching on seeds and not getting astringent biting green tannin. At Monte Bello, unless bloom was super early in 2024, there wouldn’t have been the degree days and # days from bloom to harvest to reach that sort of physiological readiness for harvest. If bud break was in February, bloom in May, then the vineyard might have been ready for an early harvest. I saw that before, 2004 and 2014. However, 2004 was an odd one. Everything was moving along quickly towards harvest. The zinfandels all ripened and were picked in August. MB was right behind, but then the weather shifted towards cold and several weather systems moved through. This put MB back onto an October harvest. A massive storm at the end, wiped out that last 25% that we couldn’t pick. 4" of rain was a lot for the vines to take on. We didn’t end up using any of that fruit for MB-it all went to the Santa Cruz Mountains BX blend (which later became CS estate, as we kept it varietal CS.)
2014 was the year of no rain. The vineyard only received about 7" that winter. The water stress was intense. Irrigation was done wherever the water resources were available and irrigation lines were in place. That was the year we ran out of water at the winery. Our deep well stopped pumping. We conserved as best we could to get through it, transporting water from another vineyard well. It was a tough vintage. All vineyards ripened early and on top of each other. Harvest was done in 3.5 weeks instead of the typical 10 weeks. It was some very long days. I’ve got plenty 14MB in my cellar and need to see how its aging. From experience, I just know that in the later harvests, we make MB’s that have so much more texture, complexity, and ageable tannins. The few early vintages just didn’t extract as well, didn’t show terroir as vividly, and seemed more shallow in flavor complexity. The problem with tasting a future sample is that the wine is so young and muttled, showing grapiness, yeast, and oak. It can be difficult to taste beyond those youthful flavors to see underlying terroir. Unless you have other vintages side-by-side, its difficult with one glass of the futures to see outside the box of that new vintage. It’s important to put it in perspective by tasting other recent vintages for comparison. That’s when you can see if there is weakness in the new vintage.
They were given out at the winery for the MB event.
I’ve got several pairs from different years. On the glass bowl is stamped “Monte Bello 201x” (year is on a second line underneath MB). They were handed out at the MB Assemblage events.
I’ll be curious on your take of 2014 MB. I haven’t tasted it since it was released. I definitely recall not caring much for the 2014 Estate Cab compared to other vintages. It wasn’t bad by any means, just merely ok.
We have them from 2011-2018. I think they also had them in previous years, and the glasses were smaller.
I know there was a point when, our rigorous selections kept the MB production on the smaller side-but our sales team kept growing the collector membership base to the point that most of the production was sold futures. The growing inventory of declassified Estate wines became a challenge in the market. Everyone wanted MB, not Estate. The narrative around Estate was changed to make it not appear as a “second” wine to MB, but a first wine of its own-coming from blocks on the mountain that never were part of the MB blend. That the Estate wine was just as good as MB, just less expensive and made to drink younger. I bought into that concept, because that was honestly true in terms of winemaking. Long before we ever characterized this concept as the differentiator between Estate and MB, in winemaking I always made the selection in the vineyard and in the winery as the fermentors were extracting. Estate bound wines were softer, less mineral driven, more about accessible tannin structure with sweet and generous fruit. MB lots were dark, dense, velvety, plush, acidic, massive and full of minerality.
Mid-2010’s the Estate wines got their own DTC club so members could buy at a discounted price, have some earlier drinking wines to enjoy while MB’s got some good age in their cellars. That club wasn’t a mandatory sign up in order to get MB. I don’t know when that shift was made. It clearly was a result of supply imbalance between MB and Estate wines. I think part of the allure of a collector program, at least from the perspective of an egocentric Napa Cult winery, is rarity and scarcity sells and supports high bottle prices. You want what you can’t have and willing to pay whatever price to get it. I think some of this mentality creeped into the decision at Ridge to set up the collector program with a waiting list and to sell off built up inventory of Estate wines. The more I think about it, the napa model really started to permeate sales at Monte Bello. The re-make of the tasting room, gardens, strict controls over visiting-you could no longer just drop in and taste. Everything became seated/curated tastings for fee. The head of DTC sales came to Ridge from Napa, the ex-president went to work in Napa (I know I spent two years in napa and discovered I really didn’t like it-that is a story of its own.) So this Napa-ism started to creep into the fabric of Ridge’s sales philosophy, and slowly without red lights flashing, subtle changes to the ESTATE club- forcing mandatory enrollment while waiting for a spot on the MB collector list became the way of business. This control helped re-allocate MB to the National wholesale market which was being stiffed. One year, I think 2015 or 2016, the entire US wholesale market only got a couple hundred bottles, versus what they used to get being several hundreds of cases. There was substantial plantings happening on MB, with four phases of planting another 30 or so acres. The hope was that all these blocks would immediately be going into MB and the supply of MB would allow all Collector Members and US wholesalers to receive full allocations. I don’t know how those plantings are coming along, if the fruit is coming out as good as they hoped. It’s still probably too early to know if the new blocks are MB quality. The Ridge approach was always to lead with quality and value, keep prices reasonable and ever rising in small increments. Not sure if $195 futures is sustainable once the MB supply returns to abundance. The price will never go down. For that price, or even the final retail price, the wine has got to be profoundly amazing. Unless, of course nobody opens their bottles anymore, since the bottles become a liquid asset. Wines in that price point become commoditized. The ordinary passionate collector is pushed out of that market, or forced to downgrade and drink the second or third tier wines. That’s basically what has happened in Bordeaux and Napa. Somehow, Ridge avoided that. Obviously, MB was the revenue maker to keep the lights on at the winery. The cost to farm and produce MB is astronomically expensive, yet it still had a very healthy profit margin. MB revenue subsidized the low profit margins from all the other wines and kept those wines in production rather than eliminating. Some years Three Valley was a loss and a drag on financials, but an important wine to continue making so as to support the production of the very best Lytton Springs, Geyserville, Pagani Ranch etc. I’m sure there’s been a lot of analysis done and perhaps some re-thinking the structure of all the wines being made, costs, sales, bottle price. All I know is that Monte Bello is a world class vineyard and it makes one of the finest wines and it should be coveted, appreciated, tasted, enjoyed with friends, family and loved ones…like I’m planning this weekend! I’m going to grab a 1997 from my cellar to have with friends. I only have a few 1995’s left, keeping those to have with my son who was born that year. EB
Looking forward to your take on the 1997’s, Eric. Our son and daughter were born in 1994 and 1997 and we have a couple bottles of Monte Bello remaining for each of those years. Cheers.
I was told at the First Assemblage event that 50% of the Cab Sauv deemed worthy for Monte Bello came from the new-ish vines (around 10 years old) on the Mid Peninsula Regional Open Space land.
Those are very young vines. It’s a good spot on the mountain and great clones (historic ones from MB) planted there. Hopefully, rootstock selection was correct for what works on mountain vineyards and with drought tolerance in mind. I believe those young vines are at most in first and second crop, depending on the planting phase. Still, keep in mind, young vines don’t have deep roots. While the fruit aroma and flavor can be really intense, do they carry the complexity and minerality that only come from deeply rooted vines of older age?
Did anyone not get an offer that was expecting one? I’m traveling, so not on top of my emails, but I haven’t seen an offer yet. I’ve been buying futures for 40 years or so, and I’m wondering if returning my 2020’s affected me receiving the current offer. To be honest, this may be a good thing as I’m not sure about purchasing this year or staying on the list so this may make the decision for me.
I returned my 20s and got my typical allocation.
I bet it went to spam.
I remember it showing a disgusting level of caramel. Not something I’ve experienced in any other Ridge wine. There’s an old thread about it.
I’m sorry I couldn’t easily find my 1997 Monte Bello to taste this weekend. I pulled out a 1996 instead. I’ll keep looking and find another great opportunity to taste it and report on it.
ATaylor is correct. When he went to the components tasting, you would get a engraved wine glass with the vintage of MB
Which clones did they use?
I had so many of these glasses I had to give them away. Happy to see they are not doing this any more.
I actually really liked them.
Oh sure, they were a nice giveaway, but after 15-20 years of collecting them, I had enough lol.
There was a selection of clones that were used in the planting, all sourced from within the oldest blocks at Monte Bello. The clones were cleaned up at Field Plant Services of UC Davis, using meristem shoot tip culturing. Fountain Grove A, B, C are commercially available clones. I had chosen those to do vineyard development at Merus and Kuleto Vineyard in Napa Valley. I’m sure the MB Open Space phase 1-2 plantings included those Fountain Grove clones and probably La Cuesta clone. Not sure about any merlot, but PV and CF clones would have been Jackson Clone 2PV and VCR09 CF (Vivai Cooperative Rauscedo-the Italian Collection.) Those were the very best clones with proven quality grown on MB terroir.