Do You Find Petit Sirah To Be Monolithic?

WINE TALK
21

Well, Michael…if you sell me the remaining btls at your cost…I’ll make sure they show up on CC before long!!! [snort.gif]

I find that PS can be very erratic in its aging curve. It, typically, doesn’t have a whole lot of fruit when young. It can, often, be pretty monolithic
as it ages and never develop much of interest until it starts to dry out & get on the tired side. I find that to be pretty typical.

This was just before Kent sold off Rosenblum wnry (and his name and his reputation) to Diageo. Many of his wines were pretty overripe, alcoholic, and over-the-top
during that period.
But…othertimes…it can evolve into something very/very interesting. The Ridge YorkCreek PS '71 I drank in the early '90’s was one of the
greatest Calif red wines I every had.

I regard Calif PS as a sabre fencer…on the oafish/clunky/orangatang side. But sometimes they show some actual skill & talent…but not often.

Tom

22

Yup, Larry…easily one of the best PS’s made in Calif. And a steal at around $30/btl. And ages just fine…thank you.
If you ever come upon the very rare “Archibald Cuvee” of this wine…you should jump on it.

Tom

23

Old school PS would take decades to come around. More recently people have figured out how to tame the grape, bring more out of it, make it approachable young.

I’d guess that Rosenblum is just at a boring in-between phase and will develop nicely. That doesn’t mean you need to hold onto 11 bottles. Maybe bury 3 at revisit one in a decade, offload the rest.

Man, that Unti mention above has me wanting to try one. I’ve been impressed with everything out of their vineyard, and their own winemaking is spot-on. I need to buy more Unti.

24

What a great thread. I am taking some notes.

25

Zichichi in Dry Creek also makes a very nice PS, worth checking out. Agree they can all be somewhat one dimensional young, the ripe fruit hides a lot of its other character - but as the baby fat burns off, will reveal a pretty complex wine.

26

IDK Chris. I would find it hard to get Grist fruit to make that kind of wine. The Grist Petite can be pretty spectacular when it gets ripe. It just doesn’t do it that often. Even in the years that the sugars jump, the Grist fruit remains bright and the natural structural acidity is fantastic. That goes for the Zin and the OV Syrah in spades. BUT I guess anything is possible.

27

Anybody yet tried the new LimerickLane PS '13??? Made w/ 100% whole-cluster (rare for PS). Scot recommends
it for early drinking…unusual for PS.
Tom

28

I have a bottle of Limerick Lane Petite Sirah 2013 that I will probably pop soon. The vinification method fascinated me.

I have had some good PS that was not 40 years old. I guess that some will remain Welch’s Concord Grape Juice, and some will offer earthy, coffee - type flavors. I remember tasting a Messina Barossa Valley Durif that was the spitting image profile-wise for a grape Popsicle dropped in the dirt. I stuck the cork in the bottle, and, low and behold, two months later, found it in my bar cabinet. I didn’t have the cajones to taste it, but the aroma was exactly the same.

29

I’ve got a bunch of Switchback Ridge PS in my cellar… and they usually start singing with about 8 - 10 years of age on them.

30

Tom,
IMO, the greatest CA red wine in my experience.
I used to own a case of this wine.
Wished I had kept one… [cry.gif]
If anyone has a bottle of the 1971 Ridge, I have a companion bottle of the 1971 Freemark Abbey PS from York Creek. A battle of the Titans?

TTT

31

I would recommend Aaron Wines out of Paso. Don’t have much experience with PS but was very impressed with his juice. Curious if any of you PS drinkers have tried them and what you think.

32

My approach has been to either drink upon release or after 15 years. Experience has shown a dumb phase for this variety somewhere in between, Having said that I am currently pondering a baffling example of a 2012 from Paso Robles that isn’t showing me anything.

33

A great, great wine. I have neither left [cry.gif]

34

The original post referenced the 2004 Rosenblum Heritage Clones Petite Sirah. When it first came out, the Parker bulletin board went crazy over it. It was delicious and very reasonably priced. I bought a ton of it, both in 750s and 375s. I loved it. My friends loved it. My friends kept begging me to bring it whenever we went out to dinner. It was fabulous. And The Bob predicted that it would drink well until 2023. I was set for life whenever I wanted a dark, inky, great PS. Imagine my contentment.
But then . . . about a year or two ago . . . it started going bad, long before Bob predicted. Very disappointing. I still have about a case of the 750s and a case of the 375s. The only good news is that I didn’t pay much for it.
So perhaps if the original poster is using that particular wine as a benchmark, perhaps he should look elsewhere. I still think that a good PS is very very nice.
Phil Jones

35

PS has been one of our favorite grapes from the very beginning (just celebrated our 20th anniversary) and we’d drink Stags’ Leap Winery PS from the seventies and eighties like it was going out of style. We started collecting them in earnest in the late 1990s but it was about then that SLW started losing some of its legacy vineyards that made up these great bottles, both via phylloxera and loss of lease and I think the wine thinned out too much for those that are looking for the big earlier wines. Turley took it to another level but must retry some of our 94s and 95s after reading recent notes. We always pair it with big meat dishes or the cheese course…it’s one of the few reds that can stand up to all sorts of cheeses.

Some of our favorites: Stags’ Leap and Ne Cede Malis, Ridge and some great ATP bottling, the rare Larkmead 1975, Turley. We had high hopes for Quixote and Carver Sutro but the jury is still out. Outpost and Rosenblum have also been good.

The older wines sometimes took on this great “redvine” taste (like the red licorice) and also seemed to drink like 7 or 8 year old wines when they were 30.

Maybe it’s time for an offline!

36

I’ve had some very nice really older Petite’s from Ridge and Freemark Abbey. But the current attraction to the wines remind me of the cult following that Charbono once had. It is a common variety, the Durif. It can be very tannic and broad shouldered when young. It can age for a very long time but IMHO, for the most part, it doesn’t evolve nor become more complex with time. It can taste chalky which I don’t like. Give me a superb Zinfandel (which has a good deal more fruit) or a Zinfandel Field blend, with Petite Sirah, Alicante Bouschet, and Carignane.

37

You know the saying: there comes a time when you don’t even want to buy green bananas. I’m just hoping that I’m around long enough to have my Nebbiolo come into maturity, much less P.S.

38

For some wines the majority are very good wines, for some grapes the majority aren’t That’s why some aren’t so popular. Recently had a CA Carignane and a Petit Verdot to remind myself, “Yeah, that’s why this shit ain’t very popular.”

Occasionally had good PS, but most are either turned into syrup or are like sucking on a sweat sock.

39

So this is pretty interesting for me. Per the two varieties you mentioned, I have yet to see a Carignane that makes sense to me as a varietal wine, especially as young vines, but as a base wine it makes a lot of sense – nice fruit, spicy, carries crop without complaint. On the flip side, I rarely find a Petit Verdot that I love on its own, but it’s one of the most useful things in the cellar when making blends. A little can take a wine from nice to excellent in many situations, and it plays well with other big dark varieties at larger portions in interesting ways.

We make a varietal Petite Sirah for our P’tit Paysan line (fitting?). We focus on making really utilitarian wines there, i.e. wines that are easy to have on your table but aren’t simple or silly – save the goofy packaging. Our lighter red is Grenache based, and it’s easy to riff on southern rhone constructions in our climate. Finding the ‘southeastern France’ sister to the Grenache based wine was more difficult because we aren’t sitting on a lot of Tannat in great locales, for instance, and what there is isn’t coming in at prices where you can make the wine I’d like to.

Enter Petite Sirah, which is fairly widely planted and well priced even in good vineyards locally. We get ours off of two Pierce Ranch blocks, one with a lot of limestone, the other heavily granitic, pick it shy of 22 brix, ferment it whole berry with a quarter-ish whole cluster at mid-80’s and hit maybe 5% new oak in the final blend. It makes this really attractive, dark, well structured but not obtrusive, really food/user-friendly red wine. We’ve had consistent 90+ scores for the last three vintages from just about everybody we sent it to on a low-$20s red wine with low alcohol. Perfect, right? Sure, except that because it says Petite Sirah on the label, it is the only wine we make that we don’t worry about running short on supply. I think that says a lot about how it has been presented, but as a dark red country wine from the right hands, it’s perfect, unassuming, consistent, not terribly beguiling but solid. Always solid. That’s my 2 cents as a winemaker, anyway.

40

Maybe you can take all of them and make one of these:
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