San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
FINDING A DESTINATION IN AMADOR COUNTY.
Shake Ridge Ranch has become a phenomenon
As dependent as they are on each other, grape growers and winemakers often endure a tense relationship as they come to terms on irrigation practices, harvesting regimens and, most touchy of all, prices.
But not this day, not in one of California’s more remote, isolated and peculiar vineyards, Shake Ridge Ranch, about 1,800 feet up the Sierra foothills and 5 miles northeast of Sutter Creek in Amador County.
By California vineyard standards, Shake Ridge Ranch is an adolescent, starting to yield fruit only in 2005. In just 14 years, however, it has gained an uncommon stature among the state’s vineyards. Other foothill vineyards also are highly regarded for their fruit — Rinaldi, Esola, Grandpere, among others — but they customarily have been around for generations, and they don’t attract nearly as many vintners from outside the immediate area as Shake Ridge Ranch.
Few vineyards, and probably none as young, account for as many wines on the wine list of Napa Valley’s acclaimed restaurant the French Laundry — 11. What’s more, while several wines from Shake Ridge are in the $30 to $40 range, many also are in the $75 neighborhood, far more than the typical Amador County bottle.
Thus, despite unseasonably chilly breezes and a continuing threat of rain, 27 winemakers or their representatives have gathered atop a series of knolls from which rows of Zinfandel, Grenache, Syrah and other grape varieties spill down steep slopes and curl into shadowy hollows.
The winemakers are here to share their wines, to see what each other is up to with fruit from the undulating 46 acres of vines about them, and mostly to pay homage to the principal steward of the spread. That would be peppy and gleeful Ann Kraemer, scion of a longtime California farming family, who with her father bought the property in 2001 and began to cultivate it to vines in 2003. Winemakers who made the pilgrimage to Shake Ridge Ranch include such seasoned veterans as Helen Keplinger of Keplinger Wines in Napa Valley, Angela Osborne of A Tribute to Grace Wine Co. in Santa Barbara County and Steve Edmunds of Edmunds St. John Wines in Berkeley. Alongside them are relative newcomers like Cary Quintana of Cary Q Wines in Berkeley and Chelsea Hoff of Fearless Wines in Napa Valley.
To a person, they say they are drawn to Shake Ridge Ranch by an abiding confidence in the character and quality of the grapes due to Kraemer’s informed and precise care of the vines.
“This is the most meticulously planted, thoughtfully curated vineyard I’ve ever seen. She grows all her grapes as well as she grows the Grenache we buy,” says Osborne, who gets Grenache from seven other California vineyards.
After 25 years of developing and managing vineyards for clients in Napa Valley, Oregon and Chile, Kraemer yearned for a place of her own, and with her father settled on Shake Ridge, a haunting and historic stretch of wildland, agriculture and gold prospecting they saw as underappreciated for its grape-growing potential. The site had been home to grapes, orchards and cattle beginning in the late 1800s, but when Kraemer arrived the slopes were cleared and open to revitalization.
The ranch is divided into nearly 40 separate and tidy blocks of vines pieced as snugly together as an exceptionally intricate and artful jigsaw puzzle. “I love doing puzzles,” Kraemer says. “My sister says this is Ann’s ultimate puzzle.”
As visitors meander up and down paths, one of Kraemer’s grape-buying winemakers, Jeff Runquist, whose eponymous winery is in the nearby Shenandoah Valley, pauses between pours to scan the fairways of vines and to muse about how much he would have liked to have been a “fly on the wall” to learn how Kraemer decided what, where and how to plant. The bedsheets helped.
Let us explain. After buying the parcel, Kraemer spent six months strolling about the ranch, studying its quartzspeckled granitic soils, drainage patterns, exposures and air flow. Row orientation was a crucial consideration, given both the hefty initial cost for infrastructure and the pivotal play of sunlight and shadow on the nature of the developing fruit — and in 2001 there were no computer models to help farmers determine that.
So Kraemer recruited a niece to drape bedsheets over ropes strung between tall posts on several slopes about the ranch to simulate a vine’s leafy canopy. The niece then was to visit the panels several times each day through September to chart how much of the ground and how much of the imaginary neighboring rows of vines would be shaded.
“I knew I wanted rows to run northeast to southwest, but I needed to work out how much angle was needed to minimize the south-side exposure,” Kraemer recalls. “It wasn’t very scientific, but it gave me a guide as we set up the row angles over the ranch.”
As to why she settled on specific grape varieties, Zinfandel was an easy early choice given the region’s viticultural history. She’d never worked with Barbera but had been impressed by the wines it was yielding in the foothills, so she added that to her shopping list. She put in Syrah at the urging of Andy Erickson of Favia Wines in Napa Valley, whose subsequent Quarzo wine from Shake Ridge grapes seizes the rich and hefty side of the variety. And Ken Bernards of Ancien Wines in Napa Valley, who makes Kraemer’s own wines marketed under the Yorba brand, persuaded her to put in Tempranillo.
Kraemer sees herself as the proprietor of a well-stocked art-supply house or spice shop, providing her clientele with the best provisions she can round up. “I’m giving them really good ingredients, like you see on those cooking shows everyone watches, like ‘Iron Chef,’ ” she says. “The contestants are given the same ingredients and they make completely different meals with those same ingredients. That’s what I think is so cool.”
If there’s an aesthetic thread that courses through wines from Shake Ridge Ranch it’s effusive aromas, generous yet tempered tannins, and fealty to any given grape variety’s color, texture and flavor.
But to Kraemer’s point, each of her buyers brings his or her own personality and aspirations to the fruit they haul from Shake Ridge to their cellars. Osborne likes to capture the “wild power” she sees in the Grenache off the ranch, while Cary Quintana goes for a more sleek and delicate version.
No wine may represent the creative impulse between site and personality more than Helen Keplinger’s Sumo, her inky, floral, spicy and layered spin on Cote-Rotie, with Petite Sirah rather than Syrah providing the base, co-fermented with Viognier and just a touch of Syrah. “It’s a style that evolved from the site, from getting to know Ann and tasting the blocks,” Keplinger says. “It’s what I thought would be interesting and complete.”
Kraemer’s Yorba label, for which Bernards makes 1,000 cases a year, sold principally through her tasting room in downtown Sutter Creek, include an uncommonly transparent Tempranillo, a muscular yet balanced Zinfandel and an exceptionally layered Barbera. The brand name “Yorba” stems from the family’s heritage, which began with Jose Antonio Yorba, who arrived in what is now California as a member of the Portola expedition in 1769. He and subsequent generations raised cattle, grains and citrus in Southern California.
Kraemer, however, was the only one of eight siblings to remain in agriculture, though the entire family, including 23 nieces and nephews, are so vested in Shake Ridge Ranch and Yorba that they frequently join Kraemer and her yearround three-person crew to help with both branches of the business.
Should this grape growing not pan out, which seems highly unlikely given the acclaim Shake Ridge Ranch has garnered, Kraemer has in reserve an option to dispatch nieces and nephews to an abandoned hand-dug gold mine on the property to resume prospecting for color.