Ridge Winery’s Secret Crop in the Vines

What happened when counterculture clashed with an up-and-coming winery.

Welcome to a newsletter themed at the intersection of longevity and wine history. 🍷

Ridge Vineyards, a winery with close ties to my grandfather’s Gemello Winery back in its early days, lost its last living founder when Sue Crane died last spring. She was 92. Crane was a former two-term mayor of Portola Valley and wife of Hew Crane, who was considered a pioneer of bioengineering.

Hew Crane worked as an engineer at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International) alongside Dave Bennion, Charlie Rosen and Howard Zeidler, where the foursome hatched a plan to acquire a 50-acre vineyard on Montebello Road in Cupertino that would become Ridge Winery.

As some readers of my newsletter may recall in this April 2024 post, one day in the 1950s, Hew Crane and his SRI colleagues visited my grandfather, Mario Gemello, at the Gemello Winery in Mountain View, seeking winemaking advice. Mario had been buying grapes from that Montebello vineyard for years.

Below is my post from May of 2024 about Ridge Vineyards, which also references Behind the Barrels: The Women of Ridge, a 2023 self-published book written by Helen Park Bigelow in collaboration with Sue Crane.

Reefers in the Vineyard

Dave Bennion spotted a couple of youthful hippies thumbing for a ride on the side of the road. This was the 1960s, and the cofounder of Ridge Winery in Cupertino was used to giving hitchhikers a lift. So he pulled over and offered them a ride.

San Francisco in that era had become the epicenter of the Hippie Revolution, a counterculture movement of free love, communal living and psychedelic drugs. This was a way for young people to protest their peers getting drafted into the Vietnam War. Thousands from all over the country flocked to the city, particularly the Haight-Ashbury district, to partake in Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin live performances under the cloud of marijuana smoke in nearby Golden Gate Park.

Fifty miles south in Dave Bennion’s bubble of Cupertino, things were a bit different. He may have been a little naive about the hippie lifestyle. If he saw teenagers thumbing for a ride, he’d give them a lift and chat them up. If they were in need of money or a little work, he’d offer them a few days or weeks of work and a place to camp in his vineyard, according to the book, Behind the Barrels: the Women of Ridge.

“This trade was to everyone’s advantage, until marijuana was discovered growing hidden in the dense greenery of the vines,” writes Helen Park Bigelow.

“This trade was to everyone’s advantage, until marijuana was discovered growing hidden in the dense greenery of the vines,” writes Helen Park Bigelow.

“In those days, stories of confiscated land were well circulated, and with so much to lose, the weed had to be promptly weeded out, along with the young people who had planted the marijuana.”

Bigelow wrote the book in collaboration with Sue Crane and is the last living member of the original Ridge founders. Released in 2023, the book’s cover describes it as ”a remembrance of Sue Crane as told to Helen Park Bigelow.”

Bennion died in a car crash on the Golden Gate Bridge in 1988. Hew Crane died in 2008 at age 81. He, along with Bennion, Charlie Rosen and Howard Zeidler partnered in the 50-acre vineyard acquisition that would become Ridge Winery. The four were engineering colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute.

One day in the 1950s, the four SRI colleagues visited my grandfather, Mario Gemello, at his winery, seeking advice about winemaking. Grandpa Mario suggested it was a lot of hard work. “Do you really want to do this in your retirement?”

Sue Crane, in her book, said she was against the vineyard purchase.

“None of the new owners of the vineyard had any experience or knowledge about wine. They didn’t even drink it. Curiosity drove them to sample some of the Gemello wine,” Sue Crane told Bigelow. “They discovered they liked the taste of wine from grapes grown on their own land, on the sunny slopes of Monte Bello Ridge.”

“None of the new owners of the vineyard had any experience or knowledge about wine. They didn’t even drink it. Curiosity drove them to sample some of the Gemello wine,” Sue Crane told Bigelow.

[My grandfather had been purchasing grapes and making wine from the previous vineyard owner, William Short, for several years.]

Later in the book, Sue Crane acknowledges a change of heart.

“Back in 1959,” Bigelow writes, “[Sue Crane] lost the battle when she didn't want to buy into [starting the winery], and was soon very glad that she'd lost.”

Some of her initial concerns, such as financial, were valid.

“Money was a problem. Money was always a problem,” Crane told Bigelow. “The Ridge families needed funds to make their business - and their wines - be the best they could be. Reluctantly, early in their winemaking years they decided to sell some of their precious vineyard acres.”

The Ridge founders also had to recruit a Los Angeles-based investor with international sales expertise to shore up the company’s balance sheet.

Ultimately, the financial burden was removed when the original owners agreed to sell the winery in 1987 to a Japanese pharmaceutical company called Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd.

The one caveat to the sale: the management at the time would stay intact. That included keeping its head winemaker, Paul Draper, who was in charge of the 1971 vintage, which produced the highly acclaimed Cabernet Sauvignon that took 5th place at the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris. Thirty years later, that same wine shot to number one in a Judgment of Paris reenactment against the same competing wines. A true testament of a wine aging gracefully.

If you’re new here—hi, I’m Kevin!

I’m the author of 🍷 Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge,🍷 my forthcoming memoir about health, aging and winemaking. (Read the origin story of the book.) 🍇

The Centenarian Playbook is my newsletter, which features:

• Healthy aging/longevity tips and stories from Grandma Kay’s long life.

• Wine history & stories of the Gemello Winery

• Ancestry & family research tips

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