Paul Draper on Lytton Springs

The following is the text of an interview of Paul Draper by Charles Sullivan. It is excerpted from Wines and Winemakers of the Santa Clara Mountains - An Oral History, which was compiled and edited by Mr. Sullivan and published by the David R. Bennion Trust. It is used with the permission of the author.

Paul Draper - "I think Richard Sherwin lived for years on a street called Valley Vista in Southern California. He came up here and purchased his vineyard in 1971. He sold grapes to Mondavi in that year and made a tiny amount of wine for himself. (He might have bought it in 1970) He called it Valley Vista Vineyard, and he continued to call it that right up to 1991.

We met by chance one rainy day in the tasting room at the old Nervo Winery in Geyserville in the winter of 1971-72. I was standing there and Frank Nervo was serving us some of his old wine and we got to talking. So he told me that his grapes were just going into the Mondavi Zinfandel blend and he was interested in our single vineyard approach. He asked me to come over to the vineyard and we came to terms for the 1972 vintage.

As we approached time to bottle the 1972 I had to start thinking about what to call the wine. Dick wanted to call it Valley Vista, but I had already decided that I didn't think that was a suitable name for a wine of this quality. I had been looking at topographical maps and had seen a series of springs there and the old hotel. And there was an old stop on the Southern Pacific tracks called Lytton Station. At least one of those springs was on his property and it was the name given to the road. That was enough for me, and I told him I was going to call it Lytton Springs. Dick said that would never work commercially. He suggested I call it Healdsburg or something like that. But I went with Lytton Springs.

The 1972 was quite Burgundian-like. It had an extended fermentation that gave it a certain spiciness and earthiness, which was unusual for a Zinfandel. It was rather exotic. The 1973 was one of the most perfectly balanced wines we ever made. It was really in a rich claret style. One of the things that gave the Lytton Springs wine such a good balance was that it had about 15% Petite Sirah mixed in the vineyard. These were vines that had been planted around the turn of the century. They were on St.George rootstock."

Charles Sullivan: "So, they were definitely planted after 1897, but probably before 1905."

PD - "We also found there was a little bit of Grenache in there and also a small amount of Carignane. They added further complexity to the wine and it showed me that some of those old growers knew how to put together a well-structured Zinfandel right in the vineyard."

CS - "And the Petite Sirah also added color that was much liked back then."

PD - "The 1973 Zinfandels were not as rich and deep in color as the 1970s had been. (I used that vintage as a sort of standard.) So I decided that in 1974 we were going to get more extraction. With that we increased the number of pumpovers with a submerged cap fermentation. Plus that, we had a beautiful year, a little warmer than in 1973. So we got more tannic wines in 1974; the Lytton Springs initially was quite tough and not as immediately pleasing as the 1973. But it has aged beautifully. The 1973 and 1974 Geyserville were also great wines. We included a small amount of the Lytton Springs Petite Sirah in the 1973 and it gave the Geyserville more structural complexity that it would have had if it were 100% Zinfandel. Those two vintages really taught me a lot about vineyard blends for Zinfandel. I tasted these Geyserville wines with Philippe Dourthe in the late seventies. Both were lovely wines but there was no question that there was an added level of complexity and depth in the 1973."

CS - " Even though 1974 was overall a better year in Sonoma for making that kind of claret."

PD - "Yes, and I think it was because of that addition of the Petite Sirah. That was a turning point. So I decided that we should take some of the Petite Sirah that the Trentadues were already growing. We would start including some of those grapes from the older blocks in the Geyserville Zinfandel.

We made the Lytton Springs wine through 1976. In 1975 we had a somewhat heavier crop and it was a fairly cool year in California. We handled the grapes as we had in the previous years, but when the wine was released people said we had changed the style. It seemed softer and lighter and more readily drinkable, but it had absolutely nothing to do with our approach in the cellar; it was the nature of the vintage.

After the 1976 vintage Dick Sherwin came to see me. He had been making a small amount of wine every year from his grapes. He now wanted to bond the winery, but he realized that he was going to need all the grapes if he was going to make the thing work. We had a handshake agreement for five more years, and he was willing to honor it, but then he'd have to go outside and buy grapes to make up for what we would be taking. I told him that we had had to leave the grapes from the flat part of the vineyard out of the Lytton Springs wine and put it into our Coast Range Zinfandel because it didn't have the intensity of the hillside grapes there. I knew that if we shared that vineyard we were going to be arguing every year about who gets the flats and who gets the hills. I told him that I'd rather step away than go through that."

CS - "You didn't get Lytton Springs grapes after that?"

PD - " Well, that part of the story is coming. We had wanted to expand production. And right to the west of Dick's place, virtually contiguous to it, was the old Norton Ranch. I had looked at that ranch but it was far too big for Ridge to buy. Sherwin asked if he could call his winery Lytton Springs. Our wines since 1972 had really gotten good press, particularly in the ear (?), under our Lytton Springs label. They had won all kinds of awards. He said that if we'd let him use that name he'd be able to sell every bottle. I said OK, since we had no place to get the grapes to go with the name. Then in 1984, one of the major shareholders here at Ridge, Bill Hambrecht of the Hambrecht & Quist investment banking company, bought the Norton Ranch because of his interest in Zinfandel. He first had the idea of making wine himself. And he did make some in 1984. But he decided not to go ahead with the idea of a winery, so he offered us the grapes and some of the 1984 wine he had made. We took him up on it. From then on we produced a Lytton Springs Zinfandel just from the Norton Ranch. I checked first with Dick Sherwin, and he said it was our name anyway. But this time we wrote up a legal paper agreeing on the use of the name. I had to pay him a significant amount to make it a contract."

CS - "Right, there has to be legal consideration."

PD - "His idea was that we have dinner together in Santa Monica at Michael's Restaurant. Our old friend Phil Reich from the Liquor Barn in Colorado was in charge of the wine there. He had made Zinfandel famous throughout the mountain states."

CS - "I met him at David Bruce's one time. He was a true believer."

PD - "Maureen and I went down and we brought all our favorite vintages. Phil joined us for dinner. Endless bottles of old Lytton Springs vintages. The meal cost about $500, and that was the consideration for the contract.

We went on making Zinfandel from the Norton Ranch and then began to hear rumors that Lytton Springs was sort of quietly for sale. At that point I talked to Dick and he was open to discussing it. Here at Ridge we could see that another wine company might step in, buy the vineyard and start using the name."

CS - "Right. Now that you have a contract with Sherwin he could sell his interest, including the name, to someone else, unless your contract precluded it."

PD - "So I got very serious. We got John Fisher and Jean Michel Valette of Hambrecht and Quist to work with us. So we were able to give Dick exactly what he wanted. His real interest was in his Mendocino Cabernet vineyard. It had been difficult for him to break even with the Lytton Springs Winery, let alone make a profit. We started this in early 1991 and by September we closed the deal. So now we owned the original vineyard he called Valley Vista, and on the same property the little winery. Now we had full rights to the Lytton Springs name."

CS - "You have the old BW there, the number."

PD - "Yes. We bought it just prior to harvest in 1991. That was the first vintage in which we brought all the Lytton Springs vineyard grapes down here, along with the grapes from the Norton Ranch, and from the Maple vineyard to the west. There are three virtually contiguous vineyards in a line running out Lytton Springs Road."

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