It’s Winter Wineland Weekend and we are celebrating by listening to Bob Dylan sing Walking in a Winter Wonderland from his new Christmas cd (Ouch! Hurts my ears and throat just thinking about it!) and drinking our latest release, the 2006 Syrah.

It seems like we don’t give Syrah the love we used to. What with the likes of Barbera, Grenache and Montepulciano around, who can blame us if our attention has strayed from “the one who brung us.” Our 2006 Syrah is more than a worthy reason to re-focus.

As you know, we have been incorporating some of our newer plantings of Syrah into our “normale” bottling. In 2006, we didn’t get the structure we expect from these vineyards. The cooler nature of the ‘06 vintage limited ripeness and phenolic (tannins) development of our winery block Syrah, so we took it old school, and used only fruit from our original Benchland Syrah block to make this wine.

That means this 2006  is a “Mini-Me-Benchland Syrah.” Similar to our 2001 Syrah, which, BTW, is drinking beautifully these days, our 2006 really shows the deep blackberry smoked meat character of this vineyard. Because most of this wine was slated for the Benchland bottling, our ‘06 received the royal treatment and was aged in a higher-than-normal amount of our best new French oak barrels. It all adds up to a wine that will certainly please long-time fans of our Syrah.