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Ravenswood
Winery, Inc. was founded in 1976 by Head Winemaker and General
Manager, Joel Peterson, and his partner, W. Reed Foster, a San
Francisco business man, now Consultant / Ambassador to Ravenswood.
That first year’s crush produced enough juice to make 327
cases of Zinfandel. Released three years later, this big, stylish
wine set a standard that succeeding vintages have followed. Over the years, Ravenswood has become a highly specialized winery in Sonoma, California, which annually produces in excess of 500,000 cases of exceptional wine. Almost three quarters of the production is Zinfandel. The balance is evenly split between Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, a thousand or so cases of barrel-fermented Chardonnay (in one taster's words, "the reddest-tasting Chardonnay on the market"), and finally, small amounts of other miscellaneous reds and white wines. While the Vintners Blend Series (Zinfandel, Merlot and Chardonnay) stresses early accessibility, Ravenswood's other hand-crafted releases, such as our Cabernet Franc, Petite Sirah, and Gewurztraminer to name a few, possess a unique vintage and vineyard identity in addition to an intense, powerful ("gothic," as one wine critic wrote) character with which the winery has come to be associated. These attributes arise from what can only be called stubborn and impractical Old World enological practices. Our wines ferment in open top wooden and stainless steel tanks and rely upon wild, natural yeasts. Grape stems are frequently added for structure, and the cap of skins is punched mechanically or by hand three to five times per day. We age our wine in small French oak barrels, fine it gently with egg whites, and eschew filters and centrifuges as much as possible because we believe they tend to diminish flavor. Many
of our carefully selected grapes for our Sonoma County Series
and Vineyard Designate Series come from dry-farmed 70- to 100-year-old
vineyards which yield low crops of highly concentrated fruit.
The younger vines are meticulously farmed and regularly thinned
to ensure premium quality. Our wines from vineyards that consistently
exhibit distinctive flavor and excellence are vinified and bottled
separately, with the vineyards designated on the bottles.The
resulting wines, whether vintners blend or single vineyard designates,
are rich, complex, fully varietal, and well suited to aging.
They will generally reach their peak in five to ten years, although
most -- particularly the Zinfandels -- are drunk young and greedily
by people who love big, gutsy, unapologetic wines. In 1990 the winery adopted the slogan (most likely against its will) "NO WIMPY WINES" and has since developed many variations on that theme. The winery’s philosophy is that they take their winemaking and marketing very seriously indeed, but try to have plenty of fun along the way and not take themselves too seriously. We believe with a passion, as do many others in the California wine industry, that wine needs to be removed from its pedestal, and placed on people’s dining room table. LOCATION TELEPHONE WEBSITE
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