2009 Pinot Noir Alpine Vineyard

Inspired by a love for Burgundy, proprietor Kevin Harvey has set his sights on making top-flight Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Pinots in particular are exceptional for their sheer personality, but I also think the wines could prove to be some of the most long-lived Pinots from California because of their minerality and structure. I tasted a wide range of wines with Harvey and winemaker Jeff Brinkman, including a number of older Pinots going back to 2006. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) none of those older wines appear close to being ready to drink! The Rhys team is obsessed with their vineyards. Everything else is fairly straightforward. The Chardonnays are vinified using ambient yeasts. The wines are not racked until they are prepared for bottling, which is done with no fining or filtration. The Pinots are made in a similarly minimalist fashion, with a high percentage of stems (50-100%) and little manipulation in the cellar. Harvey describes 2009 as a cooler vintage overall than 2008.

"It's stating the obvious but overripeness is the biggest danger we face in California," Kevin Harvey told me in March. "We get intensity in our wines like no place else, but there's always that risk of being too much of a good thing." Harvey said that his goal at Rhys is to achieve power with balance. "We want concentration but not weight and thickness." The last three vintages ('09, '08 and '07) have been extremely dry, he said "and that poses a challenge to achieve finesse. Two thousand nine was cooler than '08, which we like, but the yields were only moderate, which is always a shame, business-wise." He believes that the forward nature of his 2009s, which he calls "well-concentrated," will allow them to be drunk with pleasure on the young side while his "even more concentrated" 2008s will need more bottle age.