History
Kevin Harvey planted 30 Pinot Noir vines behind his Woodside house in 1995 and spent the next decade hunting high, rocky, shallow ground in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Skyline went in during 2004, the same year as Horseshoe, and cropped for the first time in 2007, the first year Rhys made wine from all five of the estate vineyards then planted. Construction of the cave below the site had begun by early 2006, and five years of planning and building later the 30,000 square foot gravity flow winery took in the 2010 harvest. An acre of tightly planted Syrah yielded a Skyline Syrah from 2008 through 2013 before it was budded over to Pinot Noir, leaving Horseshoe as the estate's source of Syrah. Rhys opened the site to visitors by appointment in 2024.
The Site
The three planted acres sit inside a property of about sixteen, fourteen miles east of the Pacific, facing south and southwest and standing above the fog rather than in it, so the days are hard, the nights cool and the season long. Rhys places the vineyard on the first ridge west of Monte Bello, with the San Andreas fault running between the two. The rock is San Lorenzo formation, a melange of fractured mudstone, sandstone and limestone about 34 million years old and far older than the Purisima shale under Alpine or the Monterey formation under Horseshoe. Published topsoil depths run from four inches to a foot, and where it is thinnest the roots work into cracks in the bedrock. Snow falls here in some springs.
Vines and Blocks
The vineyard is planted to Pinot Noir alone, a massale selection of twelve heritage clones including La Tache and Swan, interplanted rather than set out in clonal blocks and dry-farmed organically under vertical shoot positioning with single Guyot pruning. Blocks run to about an acre and none carries a name, since at this scale the vineyard works as one parcel. Spacing is three feet by two, with a wider 3.5 by 4 also listed, and rows that tight admit no tractor, so every pass is made by hand. Rhys's own sheet gives 3.14 planted acres in one line and 3.44 in another, while Prince of Pinot lists 2.12; the grafted Syrah acre explains part of the spread. Mt. Pajaro and a section of Bearwallow were later planted to a comparable density.
The Wines
Skyline yields one Pinot Noir in most years, fermented entirely whole cluster, raised in 25 to 30 percent new Francois Freres barrels, bottled unfined and unfiltered and sold through the winery's list. The 2010 crop made 50 cases, about 600 bottles off 14,000 vines. There was no Skyline bottling in 2015, when cold May flowering shattered the crop, and none in 2020, when smoke from the August lightning fires kept the estate from picking. The 2011 vintage showed what the site is worth in a hard year: estate production fell to about a quarter of normal and Alpine's Pinot Noir came in at 8 percent, while Skyline's reached 60. John Gilman has described the wine as weightless in fruit with spicy mineral detail, and its modest alcohol and firm, fine tannin usually ask for cellar time.