Our Wineries

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Rhys Vineyards

ProofLoyalty members have a unique opportunity to gain from our partnership with Rhys Vineyards

  • Club wines

Contact us at [email protected] or (415) 297-0084 if you have any questions or if you are interested in private events, virtual tastings or visiting our winery partners.

See Rhys Wines

RHYS

Kevin Harvey, founder of Rhys, has long been a student and devotee of wine with a particular affinity for Burgundy. The most exceptional crus of the Côte d'Or were isolated over many centuries of trial and error for their ability to produce stunning wines that speak clearly of place. Years before the first vintage of Rhys in 2004, Kevin conducted extensive research on the top sites in Burgundy, evaluating soils and collecting climate data. He looked into every aspect of the top terroirs, including soil depth, underlying geologies, soil structure, hydrology, chemistry, cation exchange capacity, to name a few, in additional to all the climate data.

From this research, Kevin teased out the key attributes of the best sites of Burgundy that engender their capacity to produce amazing wines. He then put this set of criteria to work in searching for analogous terroirs in California, first in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and then in the North Bay as well. The sites are geologically diverse, each giving its own unique signature to the ensuing wines. Rigorous, unparalleled site selection, along with formidable investment in vineyard development and farming yields fruit that does not need the corrective and prophylactic winemaking techniques often employed in the modern cellar.

Nothing is added, nor taken away in the cellar, with the exception of a little SO2 addition. The goal at Rhys is to minimize differences both in vineyard and production, so that when a wine is poured, the drinker will be staring into a glass of vineyard.

Our Philosophy

Our winemaking is focused on accomplishing the following goals:

Pure, silky concentration that can only be achieved through low yields
Beautiful balance with no component revealing itself separate from the whole
Fruit that tastes fresh-picked and perfectly ripe, not jammy
Capturing complex aromatics
Ability to age and improve in the bottle. Nothing compares to the aromatic beauty of aged wine!
Thrilling complexity and beguiling interest that never leaves you bored

Wines with a strong sense of somewhereness (rather than someoneness)

Our Facility

Consistent with our organic/biodynamic approach to viticulture, we believe that hands-off winemaking provides for enhanced vineyard expression and complexity.

Fruit Receival – our 30,000 square foot cave, completed in 2010, is engineered for an efficient natural flow from grape arrival through bottling. All of our fruit is hand picked into 500lb perforated bins, and as fruit arrives at the winery it is unloaded into a room that is cooled to 40F, allowing the grapes to remain cold until they can be sorted. This “bin cave” leads directly to the crush pad, where all grapes are sorted and gently gravity-fed into one ton fermentation tanks. This process is slow (roughly one ton per hour), but guarantees that only the best fruit makes it into the fermentation tanks.

Fermentation – one of the most important components in our winemaking regime is the use of one ton fermentation tanks. These tanks allow us to microvinify very small sections of our vineyards, giving us the opportunity to compare minute differences in terroir, leading to increased understanding of our vineyards year after year. Because of the small size of these tanks (only 4 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter), operations that would normally require machinery are easily accomplished by hand.

All fermentations are native, utilizing the natural yeasts present on the incoming grapes without the use of nutrients. By using this natural approach, we have discovered that each of our vineyards has its own fermentation “personality”, where similar fermentation tendencies can be observed over multiple vintages.

In the cellar, we employ barrels built from the finest French Oak that have been air dried for four full years in Burgundy. This expensive program requires that we purchase our oak as uncoopered stave wood 4 years before the barrels are even made, but accomplishes two primarygoals:veryconsistentbarrelsyearafteryear,andwinesthataredifferentiatedentirely by the vineyard and not by the barrel.

Our process, from harvest to bottling, is based on a gentle gravity system and our wines are never pumped, fined, or filtered. This gentle approach is intended to deliver the purest possible reflection of our vineyards’ unique character in each bottle.

Viticulture

At Rhys Vineyards, we believe that real wine quality is produced in the vineyard not the winery. Driven by that belief, each of our seven vineyards is managed with a “spare no expense” viticultural approach that is based on organic and Biodynamic farming methods. Our goal is to naturally balance our vines while cultivating a vibrant and biologically diverse ecosystem in and around each vineyard. This philosophy of minimal intervention is mirrored in our winemaking.