It was another scarce year for us and the Gumans. The vines were battered by frost early in the Spring, and then whipped by a fiere heat storm that destroyed two-thirds of the fruit on Labor Day. It was a tough vintage.

We picked and sorted with the greatest of care. The fruit is so precious, and was so scarce, that we picked raisined fruit off clusters in order to capture as much pure, undamaged fruit as possible in the press. Our efforts did not mature without reward. This is an extremely rich and complex vintage of the Sylphs, very strongly marked by the effects of evaporation and surface yeast. More than any recent vintage, the wine does not point to the bright, clean strength of California, but to dark cellars, and the untopped, stained barrels of a older world.