Winemaker Notes
#30 Wine Spectator Top 100 of 2018
The 2015 Signature Syrah displays an inky black color, with enticing aromas of smoked charcuterie, cracked black pepper, loam, and a whisper of tangerine and violets. Generous fruit flavors on the palate include plush plum and macerated blackberries, supported by pleasantly savory tannin and noteworthy acidity. With generosity and balance, it will be a pleasure to consume immediately, but also promises to improve in the bottle for a decade or more.
Blend: 98% Syrah and 2% Viognier.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
Polished and gracefully complex, with refined blackberry, espresso and smoked pepper flavors that glide along toward refined tannins. Drink now through 2025.
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Wine & Spirits
This starts off all mocha and coffee grounds, somewhat blunt and turned in on itself. But with air, it lights up like a hearth, with the meatiness of air-dried beef lending savor to a core of plum and tobacco flavor, and acid-driven focus. For lamb chops.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2015 Signature Syrah (which includes 2%) comes from Ciel du Cheval, Grand Ciel, and Boushey Vineyards and was completely destemmed and aged in 20% new French oak. It’s another Rhône look alike and offers classic notes of blackberries, black olives, bacon fat, and peppery herbs. It’s medium-bodied, fresh, nicely concentrated, and balanced, with present, yet ripe, tannin. It will keep for a decade.
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Wine Enthusiast
This wine's raspberry, cherry, herb, orange peel, coffee, smoke and spice aromas are understated. The flavors showing a very pretty sense of styling.
Marked by an unmistakable deep purple hue and savory aromatics, Syrah makes an intense, powerful and often age-worthy red. Native to the Northern Rhône, Syrah achieves its maximum potential in the steep village of Hermitage and plays an important component in the Red Rhône Blends of the south, adding color and structure to Grenache and Mourvèdre. Syrah is the most widely planted grape of Australia and is important in California and Washington. Sommelier Secret—Such a synergy these three create together, the Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre trio often takes on the shorthand term, “GSM.”
As the first recognized wine-growing region in the Pacific Northwest, Yakima Valley is centrally located within Washington’s vast Columbia Valley. The region also includes Washington’s oldest Cabernet Sauvignon vines, Otis Vineyard, planted in 1957, and Harrison Hill Vineyard, planted in 1963. Yakima Valley contains three smaller sub-regions: Rattlesnake Hills, Red Mountain, and Snipes Mountain and is ideal for both red and white wine production. In fact, Yakima Valley is Washington’s most diverse region, boasting more than 40 different grape varieties over about one hundred miles.
The cooler parts of the valley are home to almost half of the Chardonnay and Riesling produced in the state! Both are made in a wide range of styles depending on the conditions of the vineyard site.
But its warmer locations yield a large proportion of Washington’s best Merlot, Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon. The finest Yakima Valley reds are jam-packed full of red cherry, currant, raspberry or blackberry fruit, as well as cocoa, herb, spice and savory notes, and exhibit a supple texture, great body, focus and length.