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