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.