Leigh Ritchie
Leigh Ritchie’s Young Tree Wines project looks laid-back, but don’t let that fool you. While his label is named after a reggae album – Groundation’s 1999 debut, Young Tree – and he releases a wine named Natty Dred, Ritchie’s thinking about winemaking owes more to the upper echelons of California’s Napa Valley than it does to Rastafarianism. With a short and sweet array of wines in the lineup – a cabernet sauvignon, a marsanne/roussanne blend, and the aforementioned Natty Dred, a chillable red based most recently on merlot – Young Tree offers wines that hide serious quality behind their Rasta veneer.
