By Virginie Boone

Lytton Springs Vineyard has supplied century-old Zinfandel and other grapes to Ridge Vineyards for multiple decades – the winery’s 2022 vintage Lytton Springs marks its 50th vintage of the wine. Situated in Dry Creek Valley, the head-trained, dry-farmed grapes grown at Lytton Springs include Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, Carignane, Mourvèdre and Grenache, interplanted more than 100 years ago.

But while Ridge has worked with the grapes for 50 years, it didn’t take ownership of Lytton Springs until 1990, buying the property from a man named Richard (Dick) Sherwin. Twenty years earlier, in 1970, Los Angeles-based Sherwin bought the then-60-acre vineyard known as the Frost Estate for something in the neighborhood of $125,000 and hired a local guy, Bura Welbourne (Walt) Walters, to manage it.

Their first order of business was to sell off 10 acres, a piece across the street from the rest that they found difficult to farm.

“Neither one of us had any experience whatsoever in vineyard management or farming grapes or anything like that,” Sherwin once told Gang of Pour’s Allan Bree in an undated interview. “But (Walt) was the kind of guy that was quick to learn, hardworking – an absolutely fantastic guy. He just rolled up his sleeves and went around to other farmers and asked questions – so he wound up living there.”

Sherwin was a successful publisher of sorts, first in sports car magazines, later with what were known as “girlie” mags. He also founded a magazine for home winemakers called Purple Thumb, and later Wine World. He had a single-engine airplane he would fly up a couple of times a month and stay with Walters in his mobile home’s extra room.

In 1975 they put up a metal building on the site and got the winery bonded and made wine. Unfortunately, in 1987 Walters had a major heart attack. Later that year, he had another and died. He was only 55.

Sherwin met Paul Draper shortly after buying the vineyard, happening upon the already established Ridge winemaker in 1972 in the Nervo Winery tasting room in Geyserville.

By the way, Nervo Ranch is registered with the Historic Vineyard Society as an Alexander Valley property first planted in the 1890s. Its grapes these days go to Bedrock, but have in the past gone to Ridge, Starry Night and Nervo Winery. The old stone building at current-day Trione Vineyards and Winery was built in 1908 as the Nervo Winery by Frank Nervo Sr. The Nervo family operated it until 1972 when it was sold to Schlitz Brewing (who also bought Geyser Peak). The Triones bought it in 1982.

When the men met at Nervo and got to talking, Sherwin had four barrels of 1971 Lytton Springs Zin in a barn down the road, which he told Draper about. He and Draper drove over, grabbed a wine thief and after tasting the wine, Draper immediately told Sherwin he’d like to buy the fruit. A handshake sealed the deal.

Draper remembered that chance encounter in his oral history with the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, detailing how Sherwin had heard of Ridge but was selling the grapes to Robert Mondavi at the time, who were just adding them to their Zinfandel blend. He was interested in getting Ridge to do a vineyard-specific wine. At the time, Sherwin was calling the vineyard Valley Vista. But Draper wanted to call it something else.

“I got out the topo maps and old historical maps and looked at the area of the old Lytton station, the old springs at the spa and hotel Captain Lytton had built in the last century, and at the name Lytton Springs Road,” he said in his oral history. “There was a spring or two on Dick’s property, as well, so I said, ‘We’re going to call it Lytton Springs.’ He said, ‘It will never sell. Why don’t you call it Healdsburg?’ We said, ‘No, no, no. Sorry.’”

Still, there were ups and downs. Around 1976, Sherwin figured rather than just keep selling grapes, he’d come out with his own wine, the reasons for which were many.

“One of them was the fact that right about 1974 or 75 the price of grapes fell completely out of whack,” Sherwin recalled to Gang of Pour. “This old vineyard only produced a ton to a ton-and-a-half an acre, and by this time Ridge had built up a pretty nice reputation with their Lytton Springs Zinfandel. Right at that time the price of grapes went down to $250 a ton – there just wasn’t a market for the grapes.”

So he and Walters trucked the grapes to Bellagio’s Cooperage in Windsor and used redwood tanks and a basket press to make their own wine.

Lytton Springs under Sherwin and Walters got the attention of The New York Times in a 1982 story written by Terry Robards, who described the vineyard in great detail.

“The vine stalks are old and gnarled like the trunks of trees, some of them as thick as a man’s thigh, and they date back to the turn of the century. They are brittle with age and sometimes crack when bumped by a picker. Because the vines are so old, the grapes yield only miserly amounts of juice, but it is very concentrated juice, and the wine that results is intensely rich and spicy, the quintessential zinfandel of California.”

In that story, Walters is described as a former Navy cook who speaks in the drawl of his native Mississippi, committed to the old vines and their modest yields, quoted for saying younger vines don’t give him the same complexity – “You get anemic wines,” he told the Times.

After 23 years in the Navy, Walter served a four-year stint as a recruiting officer in Santa Rosa, where he fell in love with California and with wine. Untrained as a winemaker, the first commercial wine he ever made, the 1975 Lytton Springs, won a bronze medal at the Sonoma Harvest Fair. That was the same year he and Sherwin hauled equipment up to the Vina Vista Vineyard in Geyserville to make the wine. Their 1975-1978 vintages were labeled with the Valley Vista appellation.

Along the way, Sherwin also bought a Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard called Mendocino Hill in Hopland. When Draper eventually offered to buy Lytton Springs outright, Sherwin took the deal, having already moved up to Mendocino with his wife, Dalinda. The year was 1991.

Ridge built a winery and tasting room on the original Lytton Springs Winery location in 2003, the first to be made from straw bales. Both Draper and Sherwin attended the grand opening. Since then, Ridge has made Lytton Springs Zinfandel, a wine beloved by consumers and collectors, highlighting the enduring legacy of this storied vineyard with its rich, eclectic history and undeniably complex vines.

Image by Ridge Vineyards