Ripken makes DIY, unconscious wines

Ripken Vineyards & Winery building with blue signage and outdoor seating in Lodi, California. — Indoors Out

Rusty metal weather vane featuring a flying bird holding a wine glass, set against a clear blue sky.

In real life, contractors don’t arrive on Friday and leave you the following Sunday with a gleaming, new, 2,000 foot outdoor living area, complete with a 40×18 foot arbor, wet bar and fire pit. But this is television, and it’s also Lodi’s Ripken Vineyards & Winery — where you always find a rusted metallic pig with angelic wings proudly flying high on a pole because, as Richard “Rip” Ripken is fond of reminding everyone, “they said Lodi would make good wine when pigs fly, so that’s my pig flying!”

The unseasonal winter rains had not quite subsided, but nothing kept the show from going on when we dropped by the Ripkens’ winery that Friday this past March 25 to observe a small army of Lodi craftsmen humming along with master stonemasons, Derek Stearns and Dean Marsico, the quick-to-quip, entertaining co-hosts of DIY Network‘s Indoors Out. It was all business, relentless and yeomanly, even if it it did involve camera and “lights/action” hustle and bustle alongside the precision brick paver laying and dramatic erection of a sky ceiling of an arbor to end all arbors. Dean and Derek’s schtick is all about expanding homes without actually expanding homes by taking things outside (hence, Indoors Out), and this project in the Lodi wine country was, in fact, their first ever venture involving a commercial property.

Woman with sunglasses at Lodi wine tasting table with wine bottles and vineyard background. — Winemaker Susan Ripken

But it was a great fit, because Lodi’s wine industry is also about families of winegrowers — many with roots in the region’s famously deep sandy loam going back over 100 years — and the Ripkens’ operation is as family as it gets. Winemaker Susan Ripken also points out, “Dean and Derek wanted to do their first show outside a private home in some kind of wine country spot, and we were told that they first considered Napa Valley… but they ended up coming to Lodi because they thought Napa wasn’t ‘family’ enough, and I guess they chose us from among the other Lodi wineries who were interested because they thought we were small enough an operation that they could contribute to.”

“Besides,” adds Susan, “we really needed an outdoor tasting room, especially for the summer months, because our indoors tasting room was so small, we’d often have people stopping by and then leaving right away because they couldn’t get close enough to the tasting bar!”

You’ll be able to view this episode in the comfort of your own living room in about five months time (Susan thinks some time in August), after they whittle down 10 hours of footage to about 22 minutes; but in the meantime, take a gander at some of the fore and aft photos at the end of this post. Better yet, drop by Ripken during visiting hours (Saturdays/Sundays, 12-4 PM) for an actual viewing of this architectural splendor, and to taste these three equally eye opening, epiphany inducing new releases grown, vinified and bottled by this hardworking family: