Qupe Syrah - Bien Nacido "Hillside Estate"

	2003 Vintage Review 92 Points "...exuberant perfume of creme de cassis, charcoal, and subtle smoke is followed by a peppery, full-bodied wine with impressive concentration, terrific ripeness and purity, and a long, smooth cascading finish. Drink over the next decade." Click for	2003 Vintage Review 92(+?) Points Bright, deep ruby-red. Explosive, ripe, high-toned aromas of blackberry, black raspberry, flowers and spicy oak. Sweet, lush and dense, with terrific intensity of cherry, spice and floral flavor. Finishes impressively broad, sweet and long, with fine tannins and lingering notes of flowers, iron and graphite.
2003 Vintage Review Click for

2004 SYRAH “BIEN NACIDO HILLSIDE ESTATE”

This wine is 100% Syrah from the Z Block at Bien Nacido Vineyard. Our 5 acre section of Z Block is the original Hillside block planted at Bien Nacido in 1992. The perfect southwest exposure with poor hillside soils combined with the cool climate of the Santa Maria Valley give us our best syrah grapes each year.

2004 was a weird year. Warmer than normal throughout the summer and then an unprecedented two week heat wave in early September that caused sugars to shoot up way too quickly. Normal daytime highs in the Santa Maria Valley during Harvest are around 75°. For two weeks we topped 90° every day and even topped 100° on a few days!

Luckily, our Hillside syrah ripened after the heat wave, but it was the earliest we’ve ever harvested it. We picked half of it on September 26th at 23.5°, 3.34 pH and 6.5 acidity. We picked the other half on October 8th at 24.4°, 3.39 pH and still 6.5 acidity… pretty good balance for a hot year, but lower acidity than normal. (By the way, we normally harvest around the end of October and often go into November.)

The grapes were completely destemmed into small open top fermenters then cold soaked for 3 days. Punched down manually twice a day during fermentation. On day 5 we drew some juice off of each fermenter into new François Frères French oak barrels. This “saignée barrel fermentation” adds an intriguing toasty mocha note to the wine. Aging was 20 months in French oak with about 60% new François Frères (mostly Bertranges, but also some Vosges and Troncais forests). A mere 641 cases were bottled in June 2006.

This is a forward and juicy Hillside Syrah – very much in the vein of the 2003 but with a little lower alcohol (14.1%). The critics will probably like it, but I prefer cooler vintages like 2001 and 2005. You can’t deny the appeal of a vintage like this with its fruity, blueberry aromas offset by some nice toasty oak. The mouth is rich and inviting with juicy forward fruit. Drink this over the next few years while you’re waiting for your ‘01’s and ‘02’s to mature.