Who he is: Paul Draper was the head winemaker at Ridge Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains from 1969 to 2016. In 47 years at Ridge, he turned a small California winery into a global benchmark for Zinfandel and Cabernet Sauvignon, and became one of the most respected and influential winemakers in American wine history. His approach: minimal intervention, single-vineyard focus, and full ingredient labeling on bottles decades before transparency became fashionable: shaped how the industry thinks about winemaking.
Paul Draper came to Ridge Vineyards in 1969 when the winery was three years old and producing wine from old Zinfandel vines in the Geyserville area of Sonoma County. Over the next five decades, he would build the winery into one of California’s most important wine estates: and produce the Cabernet Sauvignon that placed second only to Mouton Rothschild at the 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting, the blind competition that changed how the world perceived California wine.
The Winemaking Philosophy
Draper’s approach to winemaking was fundamentally anti-interventionist. He believed that great wine came from great vineyards and careful cellar work, not from technological manipulation. Ridge was among the first California wineries to list all ingredients on its labels: a practice Draper championed because he believed consumers had a right to know what was in their wine. This meant no additions beyond the minimal: native yeast fermentations, no added acid, minimal sulfur, no fining or filtering unless absolutely necessary.
His philosophical influences were as much European as Californian. Draper studied winemaking traditions from Bordeaux to Burgundy and applied what he found useful to California terroir rather than simply copying European techniques or embracing New World technology for its own sake. The result was a distinctly California style that nevertheless aged with the seriousness of the best European wines.
The Wines: Lytton Springs, Geyserville, and Monte Bello
Ridge’s most famous wines under Draper’s direction were the single-vineyard Zinfandels: Lytton Springs from Dry Creek Valley and Geyserville from Alexander Valley: and the Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon from the Santa Cruz Mountains estate. The Zinfandels were complex, age-worthy wines that challenged the conventional wisdom that Zinfandel was a simple, jammy grape. They showed structure, elegance, and the kind of longevity associated with Bordeaux, not California. For more on the Zinfandel variety and the regions that defined it, see the Sonoma County wine guide.
Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon is the wine that cemented Ridge’s reputation internationally. Draper made Monte Bello from limestone-rich mountain vineyards in the Santa Cruz range at elevations of 1,300-2,600 feet: conditions that produced intensely concentrated Cabernet with extraordinary aging potential. The 1971 Monte Bello finished fifth in the 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting but placed first when the same wines were re-evaluated 30 years later, in 2006. For context on California Cabernet, see the California Cabernet Sauvignon guide.
The Legacy
Draper retired from day-to-day winemaking at Ridge in 2016 but remained a consultant and ambassador for the winery. His legacy is threefold: he demonstrated that California Zinfandel could be as serious and age-worthy as any red wine in the world; he proved that California Cabernet from the right mountain site could outlast and outshine Bordeaux in a fair comparison; and he established a standard of transparency and minimal intervention in winemaking that influenced a generation of California winemakers who came after him.
The bottles he made: particularly the older vintages of Monte Bello and the Geyserville and Lytton Springs Zinfandels: are among the most historically significant wines produced in California. They are also, by the standards of comparable wines, remarkably reasonably priced, which is one more thing about Ridge that Draper would have approved of. Explore more of California wine country to discover the regions he helped define.