Winemaking is part farming, part manufacturing and part art. A visit to Ramey Wine Cellars (https://www.rameywine.com) is very much involved with the latter two, but visitors don’t get to see anything about the farming aspect except a map of where they grow and source their grapes. Ramey’s winery is in an area with homes and office buildings, and Ramey looks from the outside like one of those offices. You won’t see lush vineyards and their location in Healdsburg isn’t even in the middle of the attractive area of town around the plaza.
Located where they are, Ramey doesn’t get any visitors who just happen to be walking by and tastings are truly by appointment only. The result is those who do make reservations are greeted and treated personally. We were met and escorted by Sam Tesconi, the Director of Marketing and Guest Relations. We were the only visitors at that time.
On entering their facility, one sees a large, open room with gleaming steel tanks and a variety of other equipment. There is also a ceramic aging tank that they’re very proud of. The barrel room, like the entire facility, is spotless. For educational purposes, there’s one barrel with a glass head, to allow visitors to see their Chardonnay resting on the lies, which they periodically shake up to maximize the contact with the wine.
Then it’s off to a tasting – a rather generous one – in one of the six private rooms reserved for that purpose. We were seated at a long wooden table where places were set with six glasses of wine, two whites and two reds. We sat down and Mr. Tesconi explained the makeup of each wine and the vineyards from which they came. Ramey makes wine from both estate and sourced grapes, mostly from Sonoma County but also in Napa Valley and Central Coast.
Ramey aspires to wine greatness and, while Power Tasting doesn’t review wines, we can say that we enjoyed what we tasted very much. They are best known for their Chardonnays, two of which were served. There was a notable difference between the wines from Sonoma Coast and Russian River. The reds were a Pinot Noir, a Syrah and two Cabernet Sauvignons. Each one had a distinctive character with some stylistic similarity. It would be hard to pick out one that we would call a clear favorite.
Most tastings feature recent releases with a few years from harvest. Rarely do we get to taste a winery’s top wines. In this case, while the white wines and the Pinot Noir were from the 2022 harvest, the reds all had at least seven years of aging and one, the Cabernet Sauvignon from Pedregal Vineyard in Oakville, was from 2014. We really felt as though we had been introduced to what Ramey wines were all about.
When we visited Ramey, we got a very informative, personable tasting of some rather good wines. It really didn’t matter that we had to forego the scenery.