Winophilia

I spent the last week tasting hundreds of wines from Sonoma and Mendocino Counties (and a few from Napa for good measure) and, once again, I was thrilled with the quality of many of the syrahs I tasted.  The best examples display the smokiness and floral character of top northern Rhône wines, often in combination with the sweetness and lush textures that distinguish the best California examples.  And yet, by all accounts, this category has been struggling mightily in recent times.

Yes, prices for some of the early syrah entries had risen substantially in recent years, and many new wines came onto the market at over-ambitious tariffs.  But today prices for these wines are plunging, for a simple reason:  the vast majority of West Coast producers—and not just those on California’s North Coast—tell me that demand for syrah is virtually nonexistent.

The producers I tasted with on my North Coast tour, including some small operators making wines of consistently high quality, were all scratching their heads over the market’s reluctance to embrace their syrahs—especially, as a couple of them told me, “since people flip for them when they’re poured in the tasting room or at dinners.”  The wines are rich, ripe and accessible, and rarely overwhelmed by their tannins in the early going. 

It has long been clear that due to the sheer number of new syrahs that have flooded the market over the last six or seven years, most consumers simply don’t know what to expect when they uncork a bottle.  Will the wine be in a more elegant, focused, food-friendly Rhône style, or in a fatter, sweeter and often heavier Australian shiraz style?  And, from the outset, those drinkers whose tastes in syrah are strictly Old World were hesitant to buy and try California examples.  Syrah sales in restaurants largely depended on support by sommeliers, who could recommend and describe these wines to their customers.

Today, wholesalers who were initially excited to carry the wines for distribution in their markets now give syrah a very wide berth or refuse to carry even a single bottle.  It will be interesting to see if today’s bargain prices for many of these wines convince more consumers to give these often superb wines a shot.  Can syrah re-boot at more realistic price levels?  At present, the wines floating around the market are big-time money losers for the producers.  And in tough economic times, like right now, there’s little beyond an irrational love for working with this variety that will convince a number of California producers to stick with it.

So at a time when savvy consumers are being presented with a superb buying opportunity, many top producers have either cut back on syrah production or have walked away from it completely.  Growers have begun tearing up syrah or grafting their vines over to more fashionable varieties in a fashion reminiscent of the rampant zinfandel uprooting of the early 1980s and recent conversion of old-vine zinfandel plots in Sonoma County to pinot noir.  A lot of so-so syrah vineyards will no doubt soon be producing mediocre pinot noir.  But there’s also some primo syrah being dropped, not just a bunch of stuff from marginal sites.

Wholesalers around the country are getting in on the action, too, by dumping inventories of 2006 and even 2007 syrahs at prices that are 50% or more lower than those suggested by the winery.  In the past few months I’ve been offered recent (and current!) vintage syrahs for around $25 that were originally priced at up to $65, and there was plenty available.  Compared to today’s prices for typically scarce high-end northern Rhône wines, the best California examples represent outstanding value.  But some of these bargains may disappear soon if producers decide that they simply cannot afford to make them.  In-depth tasting notes on North Coast syrahs will appear in the upcoming Issue 150 of the International Wine Cellar.