2020 SYREN - Organically grown Pinot Noir, Santa Rita Hills, Spear Vineyards
Vineyard: Spear Vineyards, single clone/single block, 667 on 5BB, north east sloping clay dominant hillsides, mostly east-west row orientation.
Viticulture: Certified organic, 3 x 6 spacing, VSP, hand tended and picked.
Ingredients added during winemaking: grapes, sulfites
In 2020 we picked twice for this wine, getting two tons of the grapes just before an extreme heat event, and another single ton two weeks later after the heat. This enabled us to craft a surprising lithe and refreshing warm-climate Pinot Noir even in a very hot vintage. Though this wine has classic Santa Rita Hills smells & flavors (strawberry, black cherry, chaparral), the textures and alcohol skew closer to Oregon.
Both batches of grapes were fully destemmed and allowed to ferment indigenously, with a single punch-down per day in two-ton open-top T-bins. Aged one year in used oak barrels. Bottled unfined & unfiltered. Vegan.
We describe the viticulture practiced at Spear Vineyards as immaculate. On the sorting table, the tight clusters of Pinot Noir are pristine, and always seem to be a much easier sort than many other Pinot vineyards we’ve seen in Santa Rita Hills. With this kind of “no expense spared” winegrowing, we see our job in the winery as merely to not mess it up. We make this wine with as light a touch as possible, so you are tasting the most elegant and seamless expression of this land as possible.
This may be our most age-worth wine to date, and will continue to evolve and develop beautifully for the next 15 years or more.
2019 Syren - Organically grown Pinot Noir, Santa Rita Hills, Spear Vineyards
Organically Grown single block single 667 clone Pinot Noir from the Santa Rita Hills.
There are layers of meaning behind the name "Syren" (as we hope you'll find layers of flavor-meaning when you drink it). We can't tell you about everything Syren means to us - some are too personal - but what we can tell you is this:
It is made from a single Dijon clone 667 of the Pinot Noir grape, grown in a single block, in a singular certified Organic vineyard in the Santa Rita Hills. The first wine whose seductive music lured Adam into the world of wine in general, and Santa Barbara/Santa Rita Hills specifically, was a single block 667 clone Pinot Noir from the Santa Rita Hills that he tasted the year before the movie Sideways hit theaters.
The influence of the sea on the land is the reason the Santa Rita Hills exists. The undulating hills draw the essence of the ocean into the vineyards here, in a valley that is unique in the world. Nowhere else this far south in the Northern hemisphere is there a growing region this cool.
It is a liminal region, a fitting home for Syrens, at the edge of things both seen and unseen. The Pinot Noir grown here devours these elements and - when made carefully, gently, and thoughtfully into wine - it holds depths only equaled by the ocean.
The grapes for Syren were hand-picked in darkness. De-stemmed, and allowed to ferment naturally with ambient/native yeasts and microbes, the grape skins were re-submerged by hand each day during a cool, slow primary fermentation. The black wine that results was pressed into 225 L oak barrels - 100% neutral - for 11 months.
In 2019 in addition to a minimal effective amount of sulfites, we added a very small amount of acidulated water to lower and balance the final alcohol content of the wine.