Ramble Buddha‘s Dharma Vineyard Carignan Mendocino 2019

In 1965, Billy Davies was just an enthusiastic young kid when his parents, Jack and Jamie, first drove him and his brother Johnny into the Napa Valley in an old pick-up truck.

Jamie was pregnant with their soon-to-arrive younger brother Hugh, and the entire
family was about to embark on a grand, albeit risky, adventure. As they pulled up a winding driveway at the base of Diamond Mountain, just south of Calistoga, there loomed above them a neglected Victorian mansion where the sole denizens were a few bats and a dusty grand piano. The Davies family had just purchased a winery...but not just any winery. At the time, Billy could little comprehend the history of this great wine estate, Schramsberg Vineyards, founded by Jacob Schram in 1862. But his father Jack realized the cultural significance of the estate in Napa lore; in fact, it had been designated a California Historical Landmark in 1957. The steep hillside behind Billy’s new home was honeycombed with wine caves bored into the solid rock by Chinese laborers almost a hundred years earlier. Even the great 19th-century Scottish poet and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson had visited, tasted, and declared Jacob Schram’s wine “bottled poetry”. In order to recapture this greatness, however, there was first a lot of work to bedone.

Billy grew up and thrived along with the estate’s fortunes. Before long he was picking grapes
into wooden lug boxes, pruning vines pre-dawn, driving a tractor, and stacking Schramsberg’s legendary champagne bottles in the hand-dug caves. Over the ensuing decades, Billy and his family would honor not only the winery’s original namesake, but
rehabilitate Schramsberg’s vineyards, and its wines, to their former glory. The estate flourished and the wines won James Beard awards and were served at the White House. Growing up with this ethos of honoring history and stewardship, it is no wonder that, when Billy decided to inaugurate his own wine label, Ramble Wines, he looked to old vines and heritage vineyards.

Ramble Wines takes its inspiration from the freewheeling fun of the Napa Valley era of Billy’s
boyhood- the 1960s and 1970s. He is revisiting once lost, and now re-found, grapes like Chenin Blanc, Carignan, Napa Gamay, and Charbono. By working with the organically farmed, old vines of the North Coast, Billy is looking to the past while making fresh wines for a new generation to discover. On one Ramble label is a photo of young Billy and his brother in the back of an old pick-up truck. Along with a wooden lug box, they are depicted right back where their unpredictable adventure first began.

The fruit for the 2019 Ramble Carignan is sourced from the Buddha's Dharma Vineyard near Ukiah in Mendocino County. This certified organic, dry-farmed patch of vines was originally planted in 1944 and takes its name from the nearby City of Ten Thousand Buddhas temple. The grapes were fermented using native yeast and 50% of the wine underwent carbonic maceration. This technique, borrowed from Beaujolais, results in a wine that is lively, bright, and fresh. This wine comes to the table bursting with aromas and flavors of zesty red fruit and savory herbs. Pair it with grilled, thinly sliced pork chops topped with dried red chili flakes for a meal to remember!