Not much, has been my answer for many years.
Hardy Wallace's 2012 version from pre-Prohibition Rosewood Vineyards in Redwood Valley, Mendocino, avoids the thick unyielding tannins that are easy to get from this grape by doing whole cluster and I suspect some form of semi-carbonic treatment. The wine is 12.6%, rather light on its feet, dark in color and has good zippy acidity. This may be as good as this stuff gets, but when you breed your peloursin with your syrah, the syrah comes out the loser IMO. Pleasantly grapey, nicely fruity, well-balanced, but just not an incredible amount of fun. The fruit is just a mite ho-hum.
A little poking around the interwebz suggests that Navarro used to make wine from these grapes, and that they gave them up because they weren't getting ripe enough. I certainly never had the Navarro version, did anyone?
It's a bit nostalgic to drag out Bob Thompson's book and look up the favored growers, and to find 25 years later from Jancis that the same folks are still at it. It reminds me of an insight I had when I had been learning about wine for a while--there is a lot of stuff in the market that you don't have to learn about or attend to. Just because someone sells it doesn't mean you have to care. I remember starting out, petite sirah was one of the grapes of California, and you would try to make sense of them. But at the end of the day, even in conscientious hands with old vines & etc., it's a boring grape.
Hardy Wallace's 2012 version from pre-Prohibition Rosewood Vineyards in Redwood Valley, Mendocino, avoids the thick unyielding tannins that are easy to get from this grape by doing whole cluster and I suspect some form of semi-carbonic treatment. The wine is 12.6%, rather light on its feet, dark in color and has good zippy acidity. This may be as good as this stuff gets, but when you breed your peloursin with your syrah, the syrah comes out the loser IMO. Pleasantly grapey, nicely fruity, well-balanced, but just not an incredible amount of fun. The fruit is just a mite ho-hum.
A little poking around the interwebz suggests that Navarro used to make wine from these grapes, and that they gave them up because they weren't getting ripe enough. I certainly never had the Navarro version, did anyone?
It's a bit nostalgic to drag out Bob Thompson's book and look up the favored growers, and to find 25 years later from Jancis that the same folks are still at it. It reminds me of an insight I had when I had been learning about wine for a while--there is a lot of stuff in the market that you don't have to learn about or attend to. Just because someone sells it doesn't mean you have to care. I remember starting out, petite sirah was one of the grapes of California, and you would try to make sense of them. But at the end of the day, even in conscientious hands with old vines & etc., it's a boring grape.
