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2003 SYRAH SANTA BARBARA
Santa Barbara County

Early in its life, this wine had all the earmarks of a wine that was going to require years of aging before showing its charms. Thus, in a moment of clarity before bottling, I decided to aerate the wine vigorously. Doing so is a bit risky late in a wine's life, but luckily for me there were no problems, and the syrah took a 90 degree turn in its development, opening up and becoming a huge, delicious flavor bomb. This wine is a blend of vineyards, all of which were cropped to insanely low yields. Since with grapes there is usually an inverse relationship between quantity and flavor, this explains why the wine shows such concentration of flavor. This syrah is composed of about 50% Vogelzang syrah, from a warm Santa Ynez site that is meticulously farmed. The site contributed the very fruity syrah character and also the substantial tannins that were more apparent in this wine's youth. 25% came from Westerly vineyard, next door to Vogelzang. The rest of the syrah was grown at Stolpman, Roll and Bien Nacido. This year, to augment the aromatic complexity of the wine, we blended in 6% mourvedre from Beckman's Purisima Mountain Vineyard, and 2% grenache from Vogelzang.