History
The land is part of Rancho Canada de Salsipuedes, a Mexican grant of 1844. Premier Pacific Vineyards, an investment vehicle backed by the CalPERS pension fund, planted the vineyard around 2007. In 2014 Stan and Ann Kroenke bought the roughly 3,600 acre ranch for a reported 25 million dollars and it became the estate behind The Hilt, the cool-climate sister to their Ballard Canyon property Jonata. Matt Dees has made the wines since, with Ruben Solorzano of Coastal Vineyard Care farming, and the vineyard is worked without herbicide or pesticide and largely by hand because the terrain allows nothing else. The name is geometric: a radian measures an angle, and Dees chose it because the site is angular and edgy.
The Site
Roughly 100 acres on the western side of The Hilt's estate, reaching nearly 700 feet at the top, some nine to eleven miles from the Pacific. Slopes run as steep as 45 degrees and the parcels are irregular enough that Dees compares them to the shards of a broken vase. The soils are the appellation's diatomaceous earth at its most extreme, ankle-deep silica from fossilised diatoms along the ridgelines, giving way to clay loam downhill. Nothing about the site is uniform; the estate states plainly that its blocks face in all directions, which is why single-aspect descriptions of Radian should be treated with suspicion.
Vines and Blocks
Predominantly Pinot Noir with at least ten acres of Chardonnay, planted to a mix of Dijon and heritage clones; producers drawing specific blocks name 113, 115, 667 and 777. The one named section is the Pinot Bowl, an amphitheatre of low ground sheltered from the summit wind and colder than the rest of the property both day and night. The Hilt ferments Radian fruit with up to a third whole cluster and raises it in entirely neutral oak, on the reasoning that the site needs no framing.
The Wines
The Hilt bottles both a Pinot Noir and a Chardonnay. Dragonette, Liquid Farm, Alma Rosa, Hartford Court, SAMsARA, Ken Brown, Kosta Browne and Dusty Nabor all take fruit. The house description is consistent across producers: lean, intense, low in alcohol, with a mineral streak and a depth that the low yields concentrate. Wine Advocate called The Hilt's Radian Pinot Noir a reference point for the region.