In the good ol’ days, I never ran across TCA with Ridge. Not so any longer. Over the last couple of years, it seems I’m batting .333 if taint were hits with Ridge. Drinking a 2012 Paso Robles at the moment. Trying to drink it. Low level but definite TCA. I think Ridge needs to address it and correct it.
I have not had a corked Ridge wine in ages. Been drinking s lot of the 2011 Lytton and 2012 Geyserville with no issues.
P.s. I am incredibly sensitive to TCA. I had about 7% corked of all wines in 2014.
I’ve been drinking Ridge for many years and haven’t noticed a meaningful uptick in TCA. I did have a corked 2009 Lytton Petite Sirah a few months ago. Ridge replaced the bottle immediately and the new bottle was fantastic. If you bought the wine at retail, I would take it back and have them replace it. Retailers in Chicago are pretty good about those sort of things. If you got the wine from Ridge, send them and email and they should take care of you.
If your having trouble getting the issue resolved, PM me your info and I can put you in touch with someone at Ridge.
They make their wine in different facilities right? Could be the corked ones came from different wineries
We would need to know a lot more about Mitch’s bad bottles to make any educated guess.
Like David, I drink a fair bit of Ridge. Cannot recall the last time I had a bad bottle.
I know with all large format bottles (1.5L+), Eric Bauer travels to their cork dealer to individually inspect and ‘sniff test’ every single cork used. That’s over 1,500 corks.
As for the 750s, that’s where the gamble and batch testing come into play.
Count me as a guy who has been drinking Ridge regularly for a while (early mid-90s) and have never perceived any out of the ordinary issues. I can’t remember a tainted Ridge though I am not claiming it never happens. I will claim that it isn’t a winery wide issue. Bad luck?
JD
I taste a lot of Ridge wines, particularly at their Monte Bello events, multiple times per year. Barrel samples, lots of bottles, wide range of wines. Had lots of wines that were just opened at the table, have never had a corked bottle there (or at home, that I can remember). Certainly not a winery-wide problem, from my small sample.
I would call myself a 98% Monte Bello drinker so take my stats FWIW. I have not had a bad bottle of Ridge in a number of years. About two or three years ago I had a problem with a few cases of mid-ninties Monte Bello. Numerous bottles were heat damaged or corked or both. They were primarily '91, '92, '93 and '94. Otherwise I have can only recall one bottle of corked '99.
I can’t recall a corked Ridge in the last 10 years… if ever.
Italy is the place where you get the highest incidence of corked wines from my experience. By far.
Ha! I think someone posted not long ago that Germany as the worst. Personally, I’ve found Bordeaux from the 80s and 90s to be by far the worst in my experience. Hands down. No contest. (A 90 Gruaud Larose was the most recent offender.)
I drink a lot of Italian wine and I can’t recall a corked bottle from a current release wine in recent years, although a 1995 Francesco Rinaldi Barolo Cannubbio recently was pretty badly tainted (sigh).
We’d have to conduct a controlled study to make any generalizations. It’s like cancer clusters: There are lots of statistical flukes.
Since I’ve been drinking wine (7 years or so), I have had more (what I believe to be) bad bottles from Italy than anywhere else.
I’ve been drinking Ridge extensively for a couple decades and don’t specifically recall a corked bottle. They are known for being much more stringent than most other wineries, batch testing and sending back.
The Lytton facility is small and can only handle Lytton estate fruit. Everything else, including the nearby Geyserville fruit, still goes to Monte Bello.
Not quite, Wes. True, the Geyserville & Pagani & EastBench are made by Eric down at MB. But John does make the Buchagnani and Ponzo as well at LS.
In response to Mitch’s OP: I pretty rarely encounter a TCA infected btl from Ridge. Ridge is probably the most rigorous wnry around when it comes to
cork selection and screening out TCA infected corks. Ridge does a huge amount of lab analysis of their wines and if there were a problem of TCA in one of their
facilities, I’m very confident they’d have picked it up by now.
That said…yrs ago I requested of PaulDraper that all Ridge wines that have TCA-infected corks should be held and then included in the orders Mitch places.
Mitch is probably still sore at Ridge because of their surly olive-oil guy!!! 
Tom
I have consumed a lot of Ridge MB from '85, '90, '91, '92 and '96 vintages. I don’t believe I ever had a corked bottle. However, almost every cork was slightly depressed and relatively dry such that without a Durand, the cork would fall apart. Never seemed to affect quality as the wines were almost always great with just a few ok bottles. I have also drunk a bottle of MB from '08, '09, '10 and '11 in the past year just to check in on them and no taint issues there either.
I buy a few bottles of Ridge Zins every year. I experienced my first bad bottle several weeks ago - an 09 Ridge Lytton Springs Zin - undrinkable. I hope this does not start a trend because I enjoy their wines.
Having a friend who was the Monte Bello vineyard manager there (he left a few years ago), and as someone who owned a lot of it going back the 70’s, I know of no winery-wide issue. I do know in speaking to him and visiting many times they take their corks really seriously and regularly send back huge lots of them that don’t meet their standard. Last I was there he said they had just sent back a batch of around 1,000 corks. He said that wasn’t uncommon for them to do as they really had strict standards. So to answer your question, unless it happened very recently, no they don’t.