Growing Season

An almost rainless winter ushered in the 2020 growing season. In all, we received just over four inches of precipitation from January to budbreak, which occurred on March 26th in the highest, west-facing plots. Summer was punctuated by several significant warming events in August and September, bringing about one of our earliest harvests to date. This timing was occasioned by the drought conditions but was also made possible by the deepening maturity of the vineyards. Over the last fifteen years, as a result of the progress we have made in our farming, our vines increasingly have demonstrated an inclination to refine tannin and achieve textural ripeness earlier in the annual cycle. Picking began on August 26th and concluded on September 21st, after 96 passes. The completion date was a critical one for the vintage; we feel fortunate to have fully completed our harvest before the devastating Glass Fire began in late September.

Tasting Notes

Despite an eventful vintage, the wine initially imparts an outward calm that emanates, on the nose, from its cool minerality. A quiet reserve defines the approach, in which gentle traces of wet stone, and mist-steeped forest softly draw the imagination closer to the surface—and then, beneath it. This is an inward journey, a descent into the wine, which asks time in the glass for discovery of its dimensions folded within. Here, deeper down, a luminous vibrancy gradually reveals the whole. An absence of extraneous ornament allows crisp acidity and fine tannins to frame a crystalline translation of the character of this untamed place. The wine’s composed, elegant clarity, born of the vines’ own wisdom, represents an inflection point—a brief moment of illumination—in our enduring pledge to unlock the hidden intrinsics of the territory.