The history of Ridge dates back to the late 19^th century, when Osea Perrone, an Italian doctor from San Francisco, bought 180 acres of land near the top of the Monte Bellow Ridge in the Santa Cruz mountains, just south of today’s Silicon Valley. He terraced the site, planted it with vines, and built a winery from the limestone rock that underpins the clay soils here and that continues to play such an imposing role in the character of the wines.

The first vintage was produced in 1892 but the vineyard’s fate, like so many prime sites in California, was tied to the political climate, and by the 1940s, after Prohibition, both vineyard and winery had been abandoned.

It was at this point that Cabernet Sauvignon was planted in Torre Ranch, one of four different sites that make up the wine today. Twenty years later, the quality of the grapes caught the imagination of four Stanford University research engineers – Dave Bennion, Hew Crane, Charlie Rosen and Howard Ziedler – who became the new owners in the 1960s, and decided to make half a barrel of wine from their vines.

From the start, they set out to do things differently. ‘We were concerned about what we saw happening in California with wine,’ is how Huw Crane later put it. ‘We talked a lot about the honesty factor. We were going to make an honest label, and all the information that a real wine lover would want was going to be on it. We were going to detail where the grapes came from, how much of each was in the blend, how the wine was made.’

This was unusual not only because they were setting out to make great Cabernet far from Napa, where all the noise over the grape’s brilliance would be centred for the next six decades, but because they were research scientists making natural wine at a time when California winemaking was being overtaken by different kinds of scientists, all looking to harness technology to control every aspect of the process.

Perhaps the two elements are not disconnected. Monte Bello has its own narrative that grows out of its location high in the Santa Cruz mountains (today Ridge comprises three main sites – Lytton Springs in Dry Creek Valley AVA in Sonoma; Geyserville in the Alexander Valley; and Monte Bello – and makes several different wines, but Monte Bello remains the one with which it is indelibly associated). The vineyards are set between 510 and 820 metres in altitude, while the air-conditioning of the Pacific Ocean 15 miles to the west keeps acidities high even while the Californian sunshine – and its location above the fog line – ensures the grapes reach full ripeness, even if harvests can stretch to mid-November.

In the cellar, the team – first Draper, then Eric Baugher, and now John Olney and Trester Goetting – has consistently leaned in to the challenge, employing what they call ‘pre-industrial winemaking’, with natural yeast fermentations, natural malolactic fermentation in barrel, and no commercial enzymes or nutrients. And from the beginning they have used (almost) entirely new American oak for ageing, even while estates with similar lofty ambitions for their wines up and down the coast, were turning to French oak.

Each one of these choices comes through in the wine, as this extremely rare vertical – the team at Ridge has never poured so many vintages at one sitting – proved. You see it in the construction of the young vintages, and you see it in the nature of the mature wines, with their lean, savoury character that comes closer to Left Bank Bordeaux than to Napa. But what comes through most of all is the character of Ridge itself, that winemakers here have been smart enough to let speak for itself.