History
A bottle of Condrieu from Chateau du Rozay, opened for Alban's birthday in 1985, set the course. He went to Condrieu in 1986, worked with Domaine Pinchon, and propagated the twelve cuttings he brought home for roughly six years before commercial production; he bought the ranch in 1989 and had vines in the ground by 1990. Of the Viognier planting he has said, "I almost single-handedly doubled the world's acreage." His 1991 Roussanne was America's first varietal Roussanne and only the second anywhere. Manfred Krankl made Sine Qua Non's early vintages in Alban's cellar, and the 1995 Tant Pis, sixty percent Grenache, was a joint wine with Alban. Alban is the founding director of Hospice du Rhone, the successor to Mat Garretson's Viognier Guild, and in 2005 Condrieu and Cote-Rotie granted him honorary citizenship. The estate has stayed a single property under one owner, which is unusual for a site of this reputation.
The Site
The ranch sits at the southern end of the Edna Valley near Arroyo Grande, in San Luis Obispo County. Published figures put the property at 250 to 300 acres with sixty to sixty-six under vine, most of them around the winery. The ground moves from neutral sand to chalky, strongly alkaline hillside, a spread of soils and mesoclimates wide enough that the block, not the ranch, is the working unit, and marine air keeps the season long. Farming is a closed-loop system the estate calls Albanic: sheep graze the rows, stems, seeds, lees and pomace all go back to the soil, and sprays are held to elemental sulfur and carbonates.
Vines and Blocks
Syrah, Grenache, Viognier and Roussanne are the core plantings, with a small parcel of Mourvedre. Reva, named for Alban's mother, is Syrah at ninety-seven percent or more with the balance Viognier, on neutral sandy soil running into chalky alkaline ground; its wine carries an iodine, oyster-shell note the other Syrahs do not. Lorraine lies beside the original Reva block on marine soils with cobbles and sandstone laced with chalk, and its first separate harvest, in 1995, filled a single barrel poured at John and Lorraine Alban's wedding. Seymour's, named for Alban's physician father, occupies the peak most distant from the winery on a dense vein of flint mixed with chalk and sandstone; the estate calls it ten acres of Syrah and Grenache on the ranch's highest ground, and the Pandora Grenache grows there rather than on separate land. Forsythe holds the Mourvedre and the name of Lorraine's grandfather Willie Forsythe, an Irish farmer and dry-stone mason; the wine's back label reproduces a postcard he sent home. Patrina is not a parcel but a blend of blocks that never showed singular character, named for the Romani word patrin.
The Wines
Reva, Lorraine and Seymour's ferment on native yeasts, spend three and a half years in barrel and go out unfined and unfiltered; Patrina gets twenty-two months and drinks earlier; Pandora takes thirty-four months in larger French vessels. The Mason has been a single barrel each year since 2004, some three hundred bottles of mostly Mourvedre off Forsythe. Estate Viognier and Roussanne carry the whites. Production runs five to six thousand cases, sold on allocation. Lorraine typically shows the reddest fruit and roundest tannins of the Syrahs and Seymour's the most structure, and Robert Parker ranked the property among the greatest American sites for Rhone varieties, red and white.