There’s also been a Jimsomare Ranch Chardonnay bottling in recent years (I had the 2008 and 2009). I think I passed on the Mikulaco based upon the winemaker notes and (if I recall correctly) higher alcohol content. The Jimsomare was good to my tastes in '08, less so in '09, but nothing at all like the SCM/Estate/Monte Bello bottlings I’ve had, so justified in its segregated designation.
Cheers,
fred
Tom,
It’s a property that butts right up to the Jimsomare and Rusten ranch.
Well what’s apparently new is that Montebello Chardonnay is no longer a boutique wine sold almost exclusively on-site [or to members] - now they’re making it in sufficiently large quantities to be able to ship it out of state and have it sit on shelves at Total Wine:
http://www.totalwine.com/eng/search/chardonnay_montebello_ridge
So the grapes for that new, much larger volume product have to be coming from somewhere.
And then the question becomes whether, maybe, the old Santa Cruz label is getting cheated in order to allow Montebello to become a much higher volume product?
Personally, I prefer the SCM/Estate without exception over 3 decades of wines.
I kinda doubt that the old low-volume “boutique” Montebello Chardonnay ever even made it to the 3-Tier system here in North Carolina - I never even knew of its existence until now - but the Santa Cruz chardonnay did, at least on occasion, and it absolutely smoked every vintage of a Ridge red wine that I tried [going back several decades of vintages].
Among the wines I tasted, Santa Cruz chardonnay was definitely the best product in Ridge’s portfolio, and by a very wide margin.
Anyway, if you care to continue to reply, then could you take a stab at answering the following two questions:
Why is Montebello chardonnay now being made in such large volume that it can sit on shelves at Total Wine?
If “Santa Cruz” chardonnay is exactly the same wine that it always was, then why was the product subjected to the marketing disaster of having its name downgraded to merely “Estate”?
When I followed this link, the only Ridge Chardonnay that appears in the search results is the Estate, not the Montebello. I did another search on “Montebello”, and the only product that came up was “Montebello Iced Tea Cocktail”, which I doubt is a Ridge product…
Huh? “Santa Cruz Mountains” is an Appelation designation. A wine with that name could include fruit from any vineyard(s) in the appelation. “Estate” is a more restrictive designation, indicating that the fruit came only from vineyards that Ridge owns/controls. How could anyone construe that as a downgrade? As to the conclusion that the designation change is a “marketing disaster”, I can only say that I doubt that Ridge has experienced any problems moving volumes of this wine after the change…
If you’re really that concerned about all this, why not just pose your questions/concerns directly to Ridge customer service?
Michael
Nathan, you’re throwing out so much speculation it’s hard to even comment on all of it.
- Why is Montebello chardonnay now being made in such large volume that it can sit on shelves at Total Wine?
Check post #4. They been expanding their Chard plantings since the '70s. That’s a lot of old vines. Decades of learning where best to plant Chard. Many more lots from which to choose.
- If “Santa Cruz” chardonnay is exactly the same wine that it always was, then why was the product subjected to the marketing disaster of having its name downgraded to merely “Estate”
As Michael said, that’s a more specific, more precise designation than calling it by the AVA. And, as I noted a couple times, it is consistent with their other wines from the Monte Bello and Lytton estates.
On the Montebello ridge they’ve greatly expanded their Cab plantings, too, and added Merlot, CF and PV. That’s a gradual and ongoing process. When they bought the Lytton property in the '90s they inherited a bunch of vines from which they hadn’t been purchasing for the Lytton Springs. (They also began expanding and grafting over.) All these other wines from that property (that made the cut) got the designation “Lytton Estate”. A decade later, to make things consistent, they began calling their estate wines from Monte Bello “Estate”.
That’s two unrelated things. You should also note they worked out their initial labeling before the industry standard we’re used to, 2 full decades before there was such a thing as an AVA. They’ve always done things their own way (often leading the way).