A nineteenth-century vineyard, revived by engineers.

Ridge Vineyards makes wine at two sites in California, but its name comes from the first: Monte Bello Ridge, in the Santa Cruz Mountains above Cupertino, south of San Francisco. The vineyard is older than the company. Ridge’s own timeline says that in 1885 Osea Perrone, a San Francisco doctor, bought 180 acres near the top of the ridge, planted vines and built a stone winery, and that he produced the first wine under the Monte Bello name in 1892. The company says that the old Monte Bello winery, built into the mountainside, is still where Ridge makes its wine there.

The modern story begins with engineers. In 1959, the company says, a group of scientists from the Stanford Research Institute and their families bought the property from William Short, a theologian who had replanted several blocks of Cabernet Sauvignon there in the 1940s. English Wikipedia names David Bennion, Charles Rosen and Hewitt Crane among the partners. Bennion made a half barrel of Cabernet from the young vines that first year, and the results of the next two vintages encouraged the partners to go further. They re-bonded the winery for the 1962 vintage, named it Ridge Vineyards and made their first Monte Bello, the company says, and Bennion left the institute to make wine full time.

The partners soon looked beyond their own mountain. Ridge made its first Zinfandel in 1964, from nineteenth-century vines on the Pichetti Ranch farther down the ridge, and in 1966 it made the first Geyserville, from Sonoma County vines the company dates to 1882. Two years later the partners acquired the old Perrone winery itself. In 1969 Paul Draper, a Stanford philosophy graduate who had recently helped set up a winery in the coast range of Chile, joined the partnership as winemaker; Ridge’s history calls him a practical winemaker rather than a trained enologist, and Antonio Galloni of Vinous also dated his arrival to 1969 in a 2016 retrospective.

Vineyard names on the label, and a list of what went into the bottle.

Ridge’s wines are named for places rather than for grapes. Monte Bello, Geyserville and Lytton Springs are all vineyard names, and English Wikipedia lists Geyserville, York Creek and Lytton Springs among the best-known Ridge Zinfandels. The winery writes its own name in capitals, RIDGE, across its website and news posts.

The label itself became part of the brand’s argument. Ridge says that in 2011 it became one of the first wineries in the United States to list ingredients voluntarily on every bottle, more than a decade before the European Union required ingredient labelling on wine in 2023. The company ties the practice to what it calls its pre-industrial philosophy of winemaking, and its July 2026 post on the subject quotes Draper, now styled winemaker emeritus. In the same post Ridge says that all of its estate vineyards became certified organic in 2023, and that every vineyard it farms is certified sustainable under the Fish Friendly Farming programme.

Two early firsts are part of the company’s own telling. Ridge’s timeline says its first shipment abroad went to the Bristol wine merchant Averys in 1974, and that in 1977 it launched its Advance Tasting Program, which the company calls America’s first winery wine club.

Monte Bello also had a place in a famous tasting. The 1971 Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon was one of the California wines in the 1976 Paris tasting organised by Steven Spurrier and later known as the Judgment of Paris, and Galloni wrote in 2016 that Spurrier himself had chosen it. Ridge’s timeline also records a thirty-year repeat of the tasting in 2006 and the winery’s fiftieth anniversary in 2012.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Napa and California wineries: Opus One, Silver Oak, Ridge Vineyards, Shafer, Screaming Eagle, Joseph Phelps and Heitz Cellar. Wineries in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family estates that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger owners, and a single wine can be sold everywhere from a winery’s own tasting room to a restaurant list.

A winery’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, bought or sold vineyards or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its grapes are grown and its wine is made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its vineyards and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Japanese owner, a Sonoma winery and a long handover.

Ridge has had one owner for four decades. Vinous wrote in 2016 that Ridge had been owned by Otsuka Pharmaceutical of Japan since 1986, and The New York Times reported in January 1987 that the new owner was Otsuka U.S., a subsidiary of the Otsuka Pharmaceutical company. English Wikipedia lists Otsuka Pharmaceutical as the parent company today.

The second winery came in 1991, when Ridge bought the Lytton Springs winery and its old vineyards in the Dry Creek Valley of Sonoma County; the company had made its first Lytton Springs wine in 1972 from vines it dates to 1901. Ridge says John Olney, who joined as a cellar worker at Monte Bello in 1996, took charge at Lytton Springs in 1999 and oversaw the construction of its straw-bale winery there. In 2016 the company bought the 36-acre Whitton Ranch, which it calls the heart of the Geyserville wine.

The handover from the founding generation has been gradual. Draper retired as chief executive and head winemaker on 1 July 2016 after 47 vintages, staying on as chairman of the board, as The New York Times and Decanter reported at the time. Ridge’s timeline says Mark Vernon, who joined as general manager in 1998, became chief executive in 2016. In 2021 Olney was named head winemaker and chief operating officer, overseeing winemaking at both Monte Bello and Lytton Springs, and the company says that in 2026 he became chief executive while remaining head winemaker, with Vernon retiring and staying on as board chairman.

The name needs a little care online. “Ridge” is a common word and a common brand name; the winery’s own site is ridgewine.com.

For a design guide, Ridge Vineyards shows how a winery can build an identity out of vineyard names, a mountain address and a back label that lists what is in the bottle. Compare Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, whose Cabernet was also poured at the 1976 Paris tasting, and Robert Mondavi, the Oakville winery founded in 1966. For this guide we use claret, sage and limestone cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ridge Vineyards’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.