History
Kevin Harvey planted thirty-five Pinot Noir vines behind his Woodside house in 1995, expanded to a quarter acre, then went looking for better ground, digging hundreds of soil pits after shallow topsoil over fractured sedimentary rock, cool marine air and natural drainage. Most sites failed. Alpine passed, and came with problems: a dilapidated house that had served as a party retreat for a San Francisco restaurateur, an abandoned Japanese garden, and slopes overgrown with the non-native brush locals call greasewood. The first block in the ground, in 2001, was Chardonnay rather than Pinot Noir. Alpine is now one of eight Rhys estate vineyards.
The Site
Rhys records 13.38 planted acres inside a twenty acre property at 1,200 to 1,450 feet, ten miles from the Pacific and half a mile from Horseshoe. The vineyard is an amphitheater on the ocean-facing flank of the range, predominantly south, averaging twenty-two percent grade with pitches to forty. Topsoil runs eighteen to thirty-six inches over soft, white, rust-mottled Purisima Formation marine shale, Pliocene and about four million years old. That depth is fairly uniform, so aspect separates the sections more than soil does. Fog does the cooling, while a quirk of exposure spares Alpine the wind most cool California sites take. Cold weather at flowering brings millerandage and tiny crops, which is why roughly two tons per acre in 2009 counted as generous. Vines go in at six feet by four, trained to VSP and pruned double Guyot, farmed organically and dry-farmed.
Vines and Blocks
Pinot Noir holds 10.71 acres against 2.67 of Chardonnay, drawn from sixteen Pinot selections and four of Chardonnay, most of them heritage or suitcase material: Calera and Swan among the Pinot, Hyde and Wente among the Chardonnay. A Block is the founding acre of Chardonnay, due east, planted to Hyde selection with Dijon 76 and 96 and dry-farmed since 2008. Ocean Block, the only west-facing parcel, was planted in 2004 and joined the Chardonnay bottling in 2008. D Block, the last Pinot ground developed and the steepest to work, has carried the Alpine designate since 2006; its Swan and Pommard held up, while the Calera portion was regrafted to Chardonnay in 2012. Hillside was laid out as a trial of more than seventeen Pinot selections on the shallowest soils on the property, where yields have often fallen below a ton; weaker selections have since been regrafted to the proven ones. Swan Terrace, about an acre and a half, was cut into rock where the hill turns east, and night air draining downslope makes it the coolest corner of the vineyard.
The Wines
Alpine Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are the constants, Swan Terrace has been bottled separately since the 2006 vintage, and Alpine Hillside is released only in exceptional years, four to eight barrels at a time. Selection is strict: sixty percent of the 2009 barrels made the Alpine designate, and the best of the declassified barrels went into the first Rhys Santa Cruz Mountains Pinot Noir, blended with Horseshoe fruit. The Pinot Noir is pale, tense and structured, built on acidity and stone rather than weight, running to black fruit with a dry, chalky finish, the Chardonnay to citrus tension and salinity. Jeff Brinkman makes the wines, which sell by mailing list.