San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A highaltitude Syrah packed with umami
Welcome to Wine of the Week ,anew series in which Chronicle wine critic Esther Mobley recommends a delicious bottle that you should be drinking right now. Last week, she highlighted a dry Muscat. Check for a new installment online every Wednesday.
Syrah is a meat lover’s wine. When made in a certain style, it can seem to approach the pinnacle of deep, savory, umamipacked flavors: bacon fat, black pepper, salumi, olives.
The trick of a truly great Syrah, though, is that it can balance those intense, meaty notes with bright, refreshing acidity (think of chimichurri sprinkled on a grilled rib eye) and more delicate, floral nuances. Syrah’s most famous iterations, from areas of France’s Northern Rhone Valley like CoteRotie, often mingle a heady blackpepper aroma with lavender and violets.
If your tastes veer anywhere close to mine, that probably sounds pretty wonderful, and you might wonder why Syrah isn’t the most popular type of wine in the world. Yet, puzzingly, it’s never established quite as strong of a foothold in the U.S. as many of us expected. Syrah is the eighth most widely planted wine grape in California, as of 2019, with less than half the acreage of Zinfandel.
But the Syrah fan club is zealous. Two of its members are Paul and Jackie Gordon, who have committed themselves to coaxing out a CoteRotielike expression of Syrah at their Halcón Vineyards, in Mendocino County’s Yorkville Highlands.
By California vineyard standards, Halcón is very high, at 2,500 feet. It sits above the fog line, giving the vines more direct sun exposure, but the elevation (and the strong winds that come through) keep temperatures cool. The result is grapes that ripen later in the season, which California vintners tend to consider a good thing — a slower ripening, the logic goes, allows grapes to develop deeper flavors. It’s a special, extreme site, and while its hills don’t have quite as sharp a slope as CoteRotie (no vineyard in California could), the Halcón Syrahs do exhibit some of the French wine’s signature characters.
Halcón’s 2018 Las Alturas Syrah reminds me of salty prosciutto and the smell of justcracked black pepper while your hands are still twisting the grinder. It isn’t a small wine — the texture is chewy and tactile — but it’s elegant and proportional. As is the custom with some wineries in CoteRotie, the Gordons coferment their Syrah with some Viognier grapes from their vineyard. Viognier is a highly floral, perfumed white grape variety, and that small measure of white wine ( just 4% of the total blend) helps soften the Syrah’s ferocity.
At $32, I consider the Las Alturas bottling to be a fabulous value; it’s complex and pleasurable enough to be a specialoccasion wine. It might be just the sort of wine to open this weekend, if your Valentine’s Day celebration features any sort of roasted or grilled meat.
The wine is available from Halcón or at K&L, Fig & Thistle, Golden Gate Cellars, Mill Valley Market and William Cross.
Halcón Syrah Las Alturas Yorkville Highlands 2018 ($32, 13.4%)