In 2003 I was invited to be a judge at the Hawkes Bay A&P Mercedes-Benz Wine Show. I'd never judged at a wine show before, so I was reluctant, but I'd also never been to New Zealand—or, for that matter, flown business class. Which is how I came to find myself, one sunny morning, sitting in front of 58 glasses of Chardonnay. Despite my trepidation, it turned out that my scores (we used a 20-point scale) were in line with those of my four fellow judges. I was completely relieved. And then we got to the Syrahs. Suddenly I found my scores either a point lower (on the 2002 releases) or a point higher (on the 2000 and 2001 vintages). The 2002s just didn't have the fruit I was looking for, and many of them seemed extremely tart and tannic. There were only a few older wines in the Syrah category, but whereas the other judges awarded them bronze-medal scores, I saw most as solid silvers. Our panel agreed on the vast majority of the 181 wines we tasted over those two days, but I couldn't get the scoring discrepancy for those 24 Syrahs out of my mind. One of my fellow judges suggested I take a few bottles home with me and try them again in a year or two.
I began opening that mixed case of 2002 Hawkes Bay Syrahs recently. And one after another, wines that had seemed “hot and dry” or “a bit dull” when I tasted them three years ago now struck me as delicious, with plenty of fruit, good structure, and none of the harsh tannins that had kept me from coming to grips with them as young wines. I'd never considered the potential benefits of short-term aging—like most people, I'd always thought of cellaring wine in terms of decades—but here was evidence that just a few years could make a world of difference.
The more I thought about it, the more intrigued I became. Vertical tastings, in which different vintages of the same wine are poured, can be fascinating, but they tell you more about vintage quality than they do about how a particular wine will age. I've occasionally been able to taste the same wine from the same vintage at an interval significant enough for it to have undergone the complex chemical changes that eventually smooth out rough tannins, and those experiences have made it clear that long-term cellaring is a delicate balancing act. Tannins may well polymerize, but the fruit flavors can also be diminished, leaving your prized bottle silky-textured but overly oaky or acidic.
If you like to taste the fruit in a wine, as I do, but also find a velvety mouthfeel seductive, Hawkes Bay Syrah in particular, and cool-climate Syrah in general, might be the ticket. Craggy Range Winery produces a fantastic Syrah called Le Sol from grapes grown in Hawkes Bay's Gimblett Gravels section. Steve Smith, the winery's managing director (and the chairman of judges at my first wine show), believes the area's vineyards make wines that combine “the hallmark lushness of the New World and the elegance of the Old.” That, in a nutshell, is what I'm looking for.
Syrah is grown all over the world, most famously in the northern Rhône, where it's the only red grape permitted in the extremely age-worthy wines of Côte Rôtie, Cornas, and Hermitage. But those wines usually require more than just a year or two to lose their rough edges. At the opposite extreme, Australia produces great gobs of Syrah (the grape is called Shiraz there) that is soft and pleasant and is meant to be consumed within hours of purchase, if not on the way home from the store. A few winemakers there are crafting more-complex, long-lived Shirazes, the best of which are absolutely world-class, but this represents a proverbial drop in the wine-dark Aussie sea. Having experienced the middle ground—wines that have both structure and fruit and neither break the bank nor resist drinkability until their teenage years (wines, in other words, like those 2002 Hawkes Bay Syrahs)—I knew exactly what I wanted in a more comprehensive Syrah tasting I recently undertook. I gathered nearly 130 Syrahs from various parts of the New World, including several mini-verticals, and started popping corks and twisting screw caps.
The best wine of the tasting came from K Vintners—yes, K Syrah, and that's the last I want to hear about that—in Walla Walla, Washington. I'd sampled owner Charles Smith's wines in the past and they'd seemed a bit awkward and over-the-top, but I'd only ever tried them in their infancy. Tasting his 2001 Morrison Lane five years after it was harvested, I found it elegant, with great balance and a lovely, textured finish. There's not a lot of K made each year, and even less Cayuse, the highly regarded wines of Frenchman Christophe Baron, from whom Smith buys some of his grapes. But both labels are worth looking for, particularly if you're willing to give them a few years to soften and come together. In the past I've found Washington State Syrah a bit inconsistent, with some winemakers aiming for fruit bombs and ending up with duds, but in this tasting, I'm happy to report, there was a higher percentage of restrained wines than in the past.
Unfortunately, the California Syrahs in my tasting tended toward the generic Aussie model. Too many of them were flabby and overly alcoholic, which made the elegant examples—like those of Edmunds St. John's Steve Edmunds—stand out even more. Edmunds doesn't have any vineyards of his own, but he seems to have covered every inch of viticultural property in California in search of grapes. Readers of his captivating newsletter, Organolepticians (edmundsstjohn.com), follow the trials of a winemaker who is dedicated to authenticity at a time when manipulation has become increasingly widespread. His words will likely cure you of any romantic notions about what it means to be a winemaker, but his wines will make you glad he perseveres. I don't want to give the impression that I don't like Australian Shirazes. In fact, I love them—even the monsters, as long as they're balanced and have clean fruit flavors. The Poonawatta and Pannell wines are from relatively cool microclimates, and it would be possible to drink an entire glass of either without having your mouth go numb. I think my Kiwi friends would agree, and I don't think they'd be surprised to hear that I'd like to change my scores on the 2002 Selaks, Mills Reef, Trinity Hill, and Te Kairanga Syrahs.
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