SYRAH SHIRAZ

Photo from Al Elmes on unsplash

You can buy a Gala apple from New Zealand, Mexico, Chile, the U.K and the U.S. and each will taste pretty much the same. That’s the idea.  

Not so with wine grapes. Fruits they may be, but where they grow can make for great difference, even within the same country. Sangiovese from the cool Tuscan coast, for example, makes wine that tastes of fresh red cherries; sangiovese from Montepulciano, a ways inland and warmer, tastes more like cherry cough drops.  

It’s mainly climate that effects the difference. Cool climates matter in ways warm climates don’t, and vice versa. That’s becoming clearer with each vintage, from many places around the globe, with the red wine grape syrah. 

Cool climate syrah smells, tastes, even feels different as a wine than that from warmer vineyard areas. And wine tasters, once they put them side by side (in place or memory), might well prefer one to the other precisely for these differences. 

Most of these differences are accounted for by how syrah ripens, a function of climate if ever there was one. Four processes occur simultaneously as red grapes ripen, but each not always at the same pace.  

Sugar accumulates in the grapes, acidity lowers; color pigments and other “phenolic matter” (the stuff that floats in the water and makes red wine “red”) thicken and darken; tannins mature and soften. Winemakers, in concert with vineyard workers, aim to have these four synchronize through the summer and then coincide at grape picking time.  

But in warm climates, quickly rising sugar levels (and concomitant falling acidity) often outpace the other two processes and a winemaker simply must pick the grapes, though they be phenolically immature, else the resulting wine be overly high in alcohol and dull from low acidity. 

Cool climates, on the other hand, may on occasion be too cool and these processes won’t team well together or sometimes one or anther just never reaches the finish line, rendering a wine “out of balance.”  

That explains any vineyard’s most sought-after sobriquet: “Warm days and cool nights”; warm days to enrich and mature the grapes; cool nights to retain acidity and maintain an even pace, like a conductor tapping his baton. 

Syrah used to be raised in warm climate vineyards only, the thinking being that this chock-full-of-everything grape required a generosity of climate.  

But not only grapes mature over time, so do vineyard and winemaking practices. Helped along by global warming, winemakers learned how to extract even more from syrah than it heretofore had given. The result was syrah (sometimes called by co-equal name, shiraz) wine high in alcohol, port-like, with fruit “cooked in flavor” and of lackluster acidity. 

However, many of those same vineyard and winemaking skills, put to work in cool climate vineyards and wineries, brought forth syrah (or shiraz) wines that were coated in other colors. The French in the northern Rhône had enjoyed these sorts of syrah for eons, but the rest of the world has been at them only of late. 

They arrive from Chile and Washington State now, both rather spectacularly, and from cooler pockets of our West Coast, some Australian vineyards, even New Zealand and Argentina.