Eric Baugher, Ridge Vineyards’ winemaker, was his usual affable if intense self but looked exhausted. He had spent the day before sniffing 3,000 corks* to check they were clean and fresh enough to insert into the larger formats of the 2013 vintage of their world-famous Monte Bello bottling. Although they had ordered Amorim’s top of the range, he reported that he had had to reject almost 2% of them.
It is presumably this sort of thing that propels Ridge to experiment with other stoppers, including bottling some wine under screwcap each year. (They experimented unsuccessfully with glass Vinolok stoppers.) A...