In 2004 I planted Syrah into pure basalt on a bench with forty miles of open sky and no windbreak in any direction. Everyone told me the wind would strip the fruit down to nothing, so I planted anyway, to taste it for myself.
There's no shade anywhere on that bench, so you'd feel the wind before you felt anything else, thirty seconds out of the car. People either turned around right there or stayed the whole afternoon; nobody did anything in between.
Les Pierres — syrah fermented wild on its own stones, nothing added but time and a little nerve.
Fall 2007, the first harvest off those basalt rows: a gust took an entire empty bin end over end across the vineyard before we'd picked a single cluster. We picked into the wind anyway, and that vintage still tastes like the fight.
Not for the wine, honestly — for leaving the quiet the way we found it. This valley sounded like this for ten thousand years before we got here. It can have the quiet back.
