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Monday, April 6, 2009
If you had to choose one red-wine varietal to drink for the rest of your life …
If you had to choose one red-wine varietal to drink for the rest of your life, what would it be?
I vote syrah as my desert-island red. French syrah, if I must choose a country of origin.
The grape attracted the attention of Forbes.com last week, and the grape has earned it.
Syrah has two stylistic extremes, it seems. In France’s northern Rhone, winemakers produce syrahs labeled not by the grape, but by their regions of origin: Cornas, Croze-Hermitage, Cote-Rotie, Hermitage. The wines share a common, defining syrah characteristic: a smoky-peppery quality that makes it seem as if a few Tellicherry black peppercorns were tossed into the barrels during fermentation, and a dash of powdered white pepper sprinkled into each bottle just before corking.
In warmer-climate Australia, where the grape is known at shiraz, winemakers focus on the jammy dark-fruits characteristics of the grape. While Aussie winemakers have made some blockbuster shiraz, the wines don’t seem to achieve the same level of complexity — the alluring layers of aromas and tastes that can’t be traced to fruit and oak — that the French seem to be able to coax from their vineyards. California syrahs — which are a relative bargain compared to that state’s cabernet sauvignon, merlot and (especially) pinot noir — seem to fall stylistically between the French and Australian extremes, depending on where the grapes are grown and the winemaker’s goal.
While French syrahs from Cote-Rotie and Hermitage can fetch astonishing prices, the wines from Cornas and Crozes-Hermitage are more reasonably priced, and they’re available on local wine shelves. Dorothy Lane Market’s Oakwood store just Friday night offered for tasting the 2003 Guigal Crozes-Hermitage ($26), and the wine was drinking beautifully. The same wine from the 2005 vintage also excelled, but will benefit from a couple of years of aging.
When I told my wine-tasting friend Tony — a Burgundy aficionado who found the Forbes link and forwarded it to me — about my choice of syrah as my desert island wine, I expected a spirited rebuttal. To my surprise, he didn’t disagree. Rhone Valley syrahs, he acknowledged, “are food friendly and consistently good, even the lower priced ones; not as fickle as Burgundies.”
I’m not looking to spend the remainder of my days on any desert island, but a lifetime supply of French syrah certainly would make the stay more tolerable.
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