Feb. 26, 2021 — Growing up an only child in a home where dinner dialogue was merely a monologue outsourced to a television news anchor, David Ramey, vintner, enologist and founder of Ramey Wine Cellars in Healdsburg, California, had a life changing experience as a college student. It would be the first of two experiences that eventually charted his career and life – one and the same.

In the early 1970s, David was majoring in American Literature at the University of California Santa Cruz. For a break, David and his friends toured local wineries and began reading books about wine.

They were invited to attend one of many soirées his friend’s mother, who worked at the University of California, hosted at her home overlooking the Bay Bridge and San Francisco. Guests were research scientists from around the world.

As David took in the beautiful vista while eating dinner and drinking wine, minutes turned to hours. He found himself sharing conversation with people whom he had just met, a new and exhilarating experience for him.

“It was the wine,” David said during a Feb. 10, 2021 interview with Chaîne. “Wine brought people together and held them together. It facilitated conversation. I just fell in love with that.” At the time, he did not connect the experience to a career but a few years later, the stars aligned for a second inspiring moment, also seared in his memory, that has defined his life ever since.

He and his friends were “demographic blips,” David said. They didn’t want to pursue traditional careers but responded to the burgeoning counterculture by approaching life realistically. They needed to make money but were seeking an interesting career. After graduation, David decided to work in a foreign country to immerse himself in a world beyond California. He had studied Spanish so he headed south to teach English in Colombia.

On the way south, he was driving his 1971 green Toyota pick-up, without a radio, through central Mexico where he ended up living with a family for three months. His thoughts turned to his future. Why not make wine, he concluded as though a lightning bolt had struck him? It makes people happy; it’s not bad for the environment; and it’s an aesthetic statement, he reasoned.

A few miles later, doubt crept in. There was no way he could make wine. Then it occurred to him he could learn how to make wine through California’s taxpayer-funded university system.

In 1976, he enrolled in the Master of Science in Enology program at the University of California Davis and spent the next four years learning about wine and the wine industry. His classmates had similar goals. “Most of us were in love with making great wine. That’s what we wanted to do,” David said.

Coursework included chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, biology, and fluid dynamics. They didn’t really learn how to make wine but the basic science at its foundation.

“There are four buckets in the wine business. You need to grow grapes, make wine, sell wine, and count the money,” David said. And unless one masters all four, it’s tough to make it in the industry. David knows some great winemakers who could never master the business side. It’s a simple equation. Revenue has to be higher than expenses, David said.

When he finished his Master’s degree in 1979, it never entered his mind to immediately open a winery. The wine industry was growing by leaps and bounds. All of his classmates who wanted to make wine got jobs as “full charge” winemakers at wineries in the United States. A few others went into sales or finance. But David wanted to learn more about wine by working where wine had been made for centuries. He was the only one of his classmates who went overseas after graduation.

The dominant grapes were Cabernet and Chardonnay; he chose to work in Bordeaux with the Moueix team learning old world methods, followed by a harvest at a large, industrial winery in Australia.

He returned to the United States after accepting a position with Zelma Long at Simi Winery where, under her tutelage, he learned production management. Five years later he took his first full charge job as a winemaker at Matanzas Creek, which was followed by six years at Chalk Hill.

In 1996, Christian Moueix asked David to come manage Dominus in the Napa Valley, allowing him to make a little Chardonnay on the side, the start of Ramey Wine Cellars. He produced 260 cases for his first vintage, employing old world methods he had learned over many visits to Burgundy. In doing so, he wrote a new chapter, and some would say a new book, for California Chardonnay.

David explained that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the norm for California winemakers who made Chardonnay was to use overnight skin contact without regard to temperature. He did not think that made any scientific sense. Leveraging knowledge from his graduate program, he conducted a research project and published a paper with his results.

He came to the conclusion American winemakers were erroneously applying red wine logic to white wine. In red wine, tannins and anthocyanins, the family of flavonoid pigments that gives red grapes their color, first form a dimer and then a polymer, imparting the wine with its antioxidative properties. Tannins are antioxidative because of their bonds with anthocyanins.

But in white wine made from grapes without anthocyanins, tannins in the skin oxidize. The wine turns brown. He discarded skin contact as a step in making Chardonnay.

David pioneered whole cluster pressing while at Matanzas Creek. He placed a plywood hopper on top of his press and dumped in the vines and grapes – no skin contact, no crushing, and no pumping. It made his Chardonnay wines more delicate and worthy of aging.

“Chardonnay is the red wine of whites because of barrel fermentation and malolactic fermentation,” David said.

Ramey Wine Cellars has steadily grown over the years. With each vintage, Ramey dispels the ABC moniker – Anything But Chardonnay. They also make Syrah, Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon varieties.

Before the 2020 pandemic and wildfires, Ramey Wine Cellars was producing about 40,000 cases per year with distribution channels in all 50 states and 28 foreign countries. In 2020, Ramey had to deal with a triple whammy in that the Chardonnay crop yield was significantly lower by “force of nature,” David said. One vineyard that normally yields 18-20 tons of grapes produced only six tons. It had nothing to do with the wildfires because the fires only affected later harvest grapes, he added.

The winery made adjustments quickly and even though sales were down 30 percent because so many restaurants closed, the winery did not lose money in 2020. “We’re hoping the second half or last one-third of 2021 returns to some semblance of normalcy,” David said.

Wine Cruise
A bright spot on the horizon is this summer’s wine cruise. It will be their third cruise.

In 2010, Food and Wine Trails, a travel company, approached Ramey to plan and conduct a wine tour throughout Italy as part of a cruise. It was so successful they held another tour in 2013 that visited wineries from Lisbon to London. The pandemic forced cancellation of a 2020 cruise in France but is scheduled for June 27-July 4, 2021 on the Rhone River to tour Provence and southern France. A pre-cruise tour of Paris and Champagne from June 24-27, 2021 is an option for travelers. (UPDATE: April 8, 2021 – The cruise has been postponed until 2022.)

Words of wisdom
With more than 40 years of experience as a student, enologist, vintner, winery owner, husband and father, David is a wealth of information on wine and wisdom for life. David and Carla, his wife, have two children who grew up learning the business from their parents. “Claire and Alan grew up hearing mom and dad talk about Ramey Wine Cellars at the dinner table. And they got to drink a little wine,” David said. Claire and Alan now work for Ramey Wine Cellars and are in the process of assuming ownership of the winery and vineyard.

David advises Chaîne members not to make wine too complicated. With few exceptions, high quality wine can be paired with almost any food.

“The most important thing is who you are with,” he said.

There are no dinner monologues in the Ramey home.

LINKS

Ramey Wine Cellars

Food and Wine Trails Ramey Wine Cellars Cruise