But of course it has to come with the lame Poe reference. No matter… This is a fun, not-so-little wine. Nice clear garnet with bright pink edges. Big smoky leather nose with a fair coupling of spice and earth. Bright, sweet caramel and sharp peat. Big unsophisticated fruit-forward goodness of a sort a lot of the wines I drink on here have progressed far beyond–or extracted themselves into a much darker version. It is not thin, and a little air really starts showing all of the spicy nuances lurking below the initial bright fruit. Definite road-tar and charcoal begin to surface.
Puckeringly tannic almost from the first taste, and all the little fruit and briar notes fall in step behind to creat a really balanced–albeit an extremely YOUNG–mouthfeel. This comes off shockingly like a very young Stolpman or Hitching Post Syrah. It’s like they didn’t worry too much about extraction and just let the grapes do their thing–and grapes from a very nice source. I am VERY pleasantly surprised. This is a 19$ wine and a WA wine to boot. That is not to shit on all WA wines, it’s just… well… My experience with a lot of Washington reds have been that of a rather ‘contrived’ sort of ripeness, a glycerolic entry with acid posing as structure and a shallow mid-section which leave a person in search of truly balanced wine and reminiscient of 8$ Aussie shiraz. There are a lot of fabulous WA wines. This is one of them. Find some.
2012 CORVIDAE Lenore Syrah Columbia Valley Washington 14.1