Ridge Vineyards built its reputation on single-vineyard wines that taste of where they grow, and Lytton Springs is the Sonoma heart of that idea. On the benchland just north of Healdsburg, where Dry Creek Valley meets Alexander Valley, gnarled zinfandel vines more than a century old anchor a wine many consider the benchmark for the region.

A vineyard with deep roots

Captain William Litton developed the springs here in the late 1800s and built a hotel for San Franciscans who arrived by train to take the waters. The vineyard that took his name was planted to zinfandel around the turn of the century.

Paul Draper, Ridge’s longtime winemaker, first walked the site in the winter of 1972 while hunting old-vine zinfandel, and he made Ridge’s first Lytton Springs bottling from its fruit that same year. The relationship deepened until 1991, the twentieth anniversary of that first vintage, when Ridge bought the winery and the old vines around it and made Lytton Springs a true estate.

A true field blend

Lytton Springs is home to zinfandel vines more than a hundred years old, interplanted with petite sirah, carignane, a little mataro (the grape better known as mourvedre), and grenache. They are picked and fermented together the way the vineyard was farmed a century ago, which gives the wine its brambly fruit, firm structure, and savory spice. For decades it has set the standard for Dry Creek Valley zinfandel.

The Ridge philosophy

Founded in 1962, Ridge makes wine with a deliberately pre-industrial hand: native-yeast fermentations, minimal intervention, and air-dried American oak. Its labels list every grape in the blend and its percentage, a transparency the winery has practiced for decades. Monte Bello, high in the Santa Cruz Mountains, is the company’s cabernet flagship. Lytton Springs is its zinfandel counterpart in Sonoma.

The straw-bale winery

In 2003 Ridge built a winery and tasting room on the original Lytton Springs site, the first in California made from straw bales. Insulated with clay and straw, it is a model of low-impact design that sits quietly among the vines that give the wine its name.

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