2020 The Language of Yes En Passerillage Syrah

2020 The Language of Yes En Passerillage Syrah

Rancho Real Vineyard, Santa Maria Valley, Central Coast, California (USA)

Retail:  $45 

Sunday Night Wine Up is a 1st vintage Randall Grahm masterpiece of winemaking that is Randall Grahm!  It is a partnership with Joe C. Gallo, founder of Maze Row Wine Merchant. 

The wine is a medium healthy red color, with just a bit of  brown at the rim. The nose yields of strawberry and peach.  It evolved with having a bit of spice and cloves that you expect in a California Syrah. 

This wine endeavor is to honor the Old World South Franch winemaking while enhancing the Central Coast of California climate and soil. Randall did not filter this Syrah and he recommends that it "will greatly benefit from decanting and a healthy exposure to air."

Doing our research we found that this wine was made by a non-standard practice air-drying the grapes post-harvest.  Using the mild climate of the Santa Maria Valley, Randall dried the grapes "al fresco in situ" with gently placing the grapes on paper trays in the shade of the vine canopy.  According to Randall, the "intent was not so much to dehydrate the grapes (this does happen, to the tune of picking up perhaps one additional degree of alcohol), but rather to lignify the stems, in other words, turning them from slightly herbaceous “green” to sturdy, puissant, costaud brown. The vitaceous equivalent of lead in the pencil, as it were. We experimented with both punching down and pumping over, and found, as with the Grenache tanks, more immediate access to the wine through pumping over (possibly through greater exposure to oxygen) but ultimately a more complete and complex extraction with punching down."