Drinking the 2004 Radio-Coteau Cherry Camp Syrah
Radio-Coteau is one of my favorite wineries. Well, it’s a virtual winery, I suppose, since they have no winery building, nor do they accept visitors because I guess you’d be visiting Eric Sussman’s garage or something.
I purchased my first Radio-Coteau wines about two years ago. When I first got into wine as a hobby, I spent a lot of time looking around at different wineries, trying to understand my own taste and refine it through the expensive process of tasting lots of good wines. Now, two years and over 350 wines later, I have a better sense of what I like both in a wine and in a winemaker’s approach to his or her product.
Radio-Coteau embodies a lot of the things that I care about in terms of wine grape growth, harvesting, and vinification. As their Web site puts it, the name Radio-Coteau “reflects a commitment to capturing reflections of soil, seasons, people and place” (link to source). This commitment is evident in the more subtle choices that Sussman makes, such as the unfiltered and unfined end product of his hard work. The idea is to let each of the diverse vineyard sources that Radio-Coteau relies upon for their grapes shine through in the finished wines.
With this background in mind, I decided to dive into my cellar and try a 2004 Radio-Coteau release that I had not yet opened: the Cherry Camp Syrah. This Syrah comes from the Cherry Camp vineyard, which was originally a cherry orchard just after the turn of the 20th century. At the turn of the 21st century, Vince Pedroia planted Syrah vines on the land, using a few clones of the Entav variety (and possibly other clones and vines as well). The year 2004 marks the first release of Cherry Camp Syrah from Radio-Coteau.
I decided to decant this wine for about an hour; my recent experience with young West Coast Syrah has taught me that decanting is a very good idea. Here are my thoughts on this wine, which I drank with some roast chicken stuffed with Shiitake mushrooms and wild rice:
- Aroma: Subtle smoky, leathery, tobacco bouquet. Very subdued compared to most of the Syrah I have tried.
- Flavor: Spicy, woodsy, meaty on the palate at first; evolved into a black cherry, blackberry and raspberry, roast meat, and spicy/smoky melange that was quite good.
- General impression: Very nice! My wife liked it, and that’s extremely rare for a non-Pinot. Worth buying again; needed 60 minutes in the decanter.
Again, it’s important to reiterate that it took about 60 minutes of decanting before this wine would yield anything at all; very tightly wound, as they say, and promising but extremely dense up front. And, once again, this wine reminded me why it’s so hard to buy a young wine at a restaurant. If it takes 60 minutes for the wine to taste the way it should, what are you supposed to do as you wait at your table for an hour? Keep eating the free crostini?
So, the big question: When I receive my Radio-Coteau allocation offer for their 2006 Cherry Camp Syrah, will I buy more? Yes, I think so. But I’ll need to sit on it for about 5-7 years this time around.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:32 am
The following are my thoughts on the Vintage 2007 Mad Dog 20/20 Wildberry I enjoyed the other night:
1) As I lie in my piss-soaked trousers, eating a carelessly discarded carton of what I think may be shrimp fried rice, I decided to decant the bottle of Mad Dog that I’ve been hoarding for several weeks now. After smelling the underside of the aluminum cap I was brought back to childhood days where drinking Kool-Aid in the one-bedroom apartment I shared with six people was a pleasure.
2) I splashed a small test sip into a wiped out 8 oz. McDonald’s coffee cup. After throwing down the first swaggle, I was reminded of the first time I drank Aqua Velva through eight slices of Wonder Bread. The wine gods must have been smiling down on the Mad Dog plant the day this batch screamed off the assembly line.
3) My initial thoughts as this product first touched my palate reminded me of the time I passed out drunk face first into a produce stand.
My afterthoughts are:
* Next time I pair this particular variety, it will most likely be with whatever crumbs someone did not chew off of a corn dog stick from Sonic. And possibly a two-day old rye bagel from the bakery.