David R. Bennion  David Ralph Bennion was a leading California winemaker who was the founder and winemaker at Ridge Vineyards in California from 1959 to 1969. From an early period, Bennion labeled Ridge Vineyards wines by vineyard, district and appellation, a first for California Zinfandel and a practice later followed by nearly every winery in the state. Ridge's flagship wine, Monte Bello is considered one of the great wines of the world. Bennion was born in Utah, on his family's farm on February 12, 1929. In the late 1940s he moved to California, where he enrolled at Stanford University. While at Stanford, he met Frances Lusk, whom he married in 1953. Bennion started his career at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) where he specialized in Magnetic Circuits. He was instrumental in designing the circuitry for Shakey the Robot, which has the distinction of being the first robot to reason about its own actions. In 1959, Bennion, Hewitt Crane, Charles Rosen and Howard Zeidler purchased an 80 acre winery and vineyard above Cupertino in the Santa Cruz Mountains. That same year, he produced his very first wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon from the vineyard. Excited by the quality of the early wines, the partners decided to re-bond the winery in time for the 1962 vintage, calling their endeavor Ridge Vineyards. In 1964, he produced the first Ridge Zinfandel, from a small nineteenth-century vineyard on the nearby Picchetti ranch. This was followed in 1966 by the first Geyserville Zinfandel. By focusing on single-vineyard Zinfandels—Sonoma, Santa Cruz, Lodi, Paso Robles—Bennion showed that Zinfandel can express terroir. He would go on to make single-vineyard wines from many other varieties including: Chardonnay, Ruby Cabernet, Riesling and Cabernet Franc. Bennion hired a San Francisco artist to design a unique label for his wines. It featured the use of Optima font and featured specifics that were nearly unheard of in California winemaking, such as the vineyard, grape composition, and exact alcohol by volume of the finished wine. Each bottling featured winemaking notes, detailing the weather, harvest conditions and bottling date. His winemaking style championed minimal intervention. A major component of this philosophy was to make use of the natural yeasts on the grapes.