Syrah Talk

I’ve been on a real syrah kick lately. It’s pretty much all I’ve been drinking in the last 6 months or so. Mostly I drink the Washington ones because they tend to be very tasty and good value, but while I’m in Kelowna I decided to try a few local ones.

I first tried out the 2003 Burrowing Owl Syrah at a local Italian restaurant. The food was rather underwhelming, but the wine was really tasty. It was leathery and smokey on the nose, lush and full-bodied, and had the nice acidity that is also common in the Washington syrahs. It was an eclectic mix of old and new. I was chatting with a dude at one of the wine stores here the other day and mentioned this wine; he scoffed at it as a Burrowing Owl label whore wine, over-extracted, and unable to decide if it’s a Rhone syrah or a new world syrah. He was actually pretty obnoxious. Someone at Burrowing Owl must have rubbed him wrong. I totally disagree with him: it’s a big wine, but it’s definitely not over-extracted, and I think the mix of old and new in this wine is what makes it so interesting. I tried to find a few bottles of it to take back with me, but of course the 2003 is all sold out and you can only get the 2004 if you drive out to the winery. Forget that.

Even though this dude at the wine store was a rather unpleasant, stocky little man, I still bought two bottles of local syrah from him: a 2004 Twisted Tree Syrah and a 2003 Cedar Creek Syrah. I’m going to drink them both before I leave.