2008 Pinot Noir Home Vineyard

"Our style puts a lot of pressure on the vineyard because if the fruit isn't up to it then the wine is thin and has no fruit, so it fails," owner Kevin Harvey told me. He added that the philosophy at Rhys is "to make wines that have structure and depth but minimal weight, which is why we're working with the least fertile sites we can plant, with minimal topsoil and steep grades." The tightly planted Rhys vineyards, which are almost all at precarious angles reminiscent of the riverside vineyards of Europe, can only be worked by hand as there's no machine that could function on these steep slopes. Winemaker Jeff Brinkman admitted that "this is pretty crazy in terms of labor but we're trying to do whatever it takes, without any regard to cost, to see how far and high we can go." The new, ridiculously engineered Rhys cellars, which sit on and burrow into a mountaintop directly across from Ridge, should be operational by this fall. This relatively new winery has probably made as big an immediate splash as I can recall in California, and the wines, which are far more about finesse and complexity than extroverted fruit, are already extremely difficult to find but are absolutely worth the effort to track down.