This past weekend, Patricia and I attended a concert and poetry reading at the home of Paul and Maureen Draper. Maureen is a wonderful classical pianist and she hosts small concerts at their home a couple of times a year. Paul Draper, for those who may not be familiar with the name, is the founder of Ridge Winery. Ridge is famous for their flagship wine Ridge Montebello Cabernet, and also for their phenomenol single vineyard designation Zinfandels. For me it is a two-fold treat to be able to spend an afternoon listening to beautiful music and get to talk to a world renowned wine maker about wine.
The last time we were there, Patricia took a bottle of our 2006 Wren's Nest Sleepy Holler Vineyard Syrah as a gift for Maureen. We received an email from Maureen a month or so ago, saying how much they enjoyed it and basically saying how surprised they were that a home wine was so good. She also was the source for our introduction to the current wine maker at Ridge, who provided the contact information for Beauregard Winery, who in turn provided the introduction to the Nelson Family for our source of grapes locally in the Santa Cruz Mountains. This was our version of "heard it through the grapevine"!
Maureen told us this past weekend of a recent request that Paul had for an interview from the author of a wine blog. She said that he was contacted frequently by wine writers and authors for articles in various publications, but that this one had asked him to talk about the last two wines that he had drunk. He told the interviewer that one was an older Italian Barolo (which I can't remember) and the other was Wren's Nest Syrah. Maureen did not go into detail about the descriptions that he gave, but told us that the interviewer (a woman) called back that next day to say that she had researched the wines and found information about the Barolo but could not find anything about Wren's Nest. Where is the waiter from Carmel when you need him?
Jim and Kathryn, I hope you are having a wonderful time in Siena. One of the pictures from the previous post shows four bottles of 2007 Syrah standing less than upright on the card table in the winery. We only drank a little from one of the bottles, the rest was used to top off one of the carboys! It will be my personal challange to round up a bottle from everyone in the group to replenish your stock before you return! In case you missed the previous posting, here it is again.
