Dry Stack Vineyard

Dry Stack Vineyard is located in Bennett Valley, just southeast of the city of Santa Rosa, in the shadow of Sonoma Mountain. Lining Bennett Valley Road are small ranches and vineyards; it has an upscale bucolic feel. Lichen draped oaks are scattered about the hills and Bennett Mountain looms to the northeast. The valley runs northwest to southeast, up to the lower flanks of Sonoma Mountain. It is not fully planted, unlike the Russian River plain to the northwest of town which is pretty much a monoculture of grapevines.

Peter and Marie Young own Dry Stack vineyard. They are all about the wine, because they make some themselves and know that without top notch grapes, the wine will not be great. The first time I met with Peter and Marie to discuss buying grapes we sat at a picnic table overlooking the vineyard and drank a bottle of Vouvray. Civilized indeed. These are some of the best tended Syrah vines I work with. Syrah is an unruly variety that loves to grow shoots and leaves, but here the vegetation is neatly tended and tucked into the trellis wires so that all the leaves get an equal measure of sunshine. With a late ripening variety in a cool climate, this is really important. Like the other growers I work with, we are all on the same page, and while I visit the vineyard pretty often I usually don’t have a lot more to say than “It looks great, as usual.”

Dry Stack is partway up the ridge that forms the western boundary of the AVA. Soils there, like much of the north coast, are a combination of marine clays and lighter textured volcanic material. It is quite rocky, and the name Dry Stack is taken from the many dry stack stone walls on the property, built from the rocks that littered the site prior to it being a vineyard. The Syrah ripens surprisingly late here, around the end of October, which it truly the end of the season in these parts. Because it ripens so late, it tends to dodge the heat waves that inevitably strike the north coast of California in the early fall and late summer, so I can leave the grapes out there a very long time. When they come in, they are always beautifully unblemished (fruit from hotter areas can get a little beat up if it has to hang through a protracted heat wave). While pretty grapes don’t always mean good wine, at Dry Stack I always get pure Syrah flavors unmarred by overripe or raisiny notes.

Like many winemakers who are working with cool climate Syrah in California, I continue to be convinced that Syrah might be the ideal red grape for the Californian climate. In cool sites like Bennett Valley it produces deeply colored wines with tremendous fruit expression. No high alcohol jammy fruit bombs here. There’s some of that “old world meets new world” combination of flowers and dried herbs with ripe black fruits and meat that is exactly what I am looking for in Californian Syrah. You can tell that I like this vineyard, I guess.

2007 Dry Stack Vineyard Bennett Valley Syrah

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