~Syrah~

The Harvest
Two thousand one is the thirds vintage of this wine and without a doubt the best wine we’ve ever produced from Garys’ Vineyard. Reflecting back to the 1999 we again pared down the yield to one ton per acre or one cluster per every other shoot. The vintage was warm but overall fairly even and a great vintage for the Central Coast and Santa Lucia Highlands in particular. We harvested on October 15th taking 6.04 tons from our 5 acre plot with little concern for mold or botrytis.

In retrospect, I am extremely pleased with the vintage and rank it number two behind 1990 as one of the best vintages I have had the pleasure to be part of since I began making wine in 1985. My daughter Francesca says that it is her best vintage for Syrah.

The Vineyard
Gary Pisoni first introduced me to Gary Franscioni in 1997. A reserved man of quiet intensity, he shared the same desire to grow world class Syrah as he did for Pinot Noir. For all of Gary Pisoni’s boisterous passion, Gary Franscioni exhibited an understated confidence as a world-class grower. Together they planted 8 acres combined of Syrah from the Estrella clone and grafted to 3309 and 5C rootstock. The vineyard site in Monterey is just about 8 kilometers south of Sleepy Hollow Vineyard along the Santa Lucia Highlands bench. Planted to a vertical trellis on 3 X 8 spacing, and farmed to 15 hectoliters per hectare. Because of the youth of these vines I wanted to make sure that we got as much intensity of flavor as possible.

Most of our vineyard sites are significantly influenced by the relative proximity to the Pacific Ocean and Garys’ Vineyard is no exception. Often we will see fog lingering in the vineyard until late in the morning only to return in the late afternoon. This contributes to the slow evolution and the fairly high acid of our grapes, an essential component of our wines.

The Production
This being our third Syrah I drew inspiration from my dear friend Bob Fleming, a virtual guru of Northern Rhone wines. He inspired me to grow this wine as a tribute to all his guidance in the development of Arcadian.

The grapes undergo a tremendous amount of triage (sorting) both in the vineyard and in the cellar. I consider this to be one of the most significant practices we employ. They were crushed using a Demoissey destemmer / crusher and were inoculated and punched down immediately to get relatively warm fermentations. We wanted to bring out as much of the natural earth and spice flavors that the berries contained. The total fermentation time was 12 days the resultant wine went directly to barrel and was aged 22 months before being bottled unfined and unfiltered.