An Amazing South African Syrah and the Contrast with a Less Amazing Cali Shiraz...A Cool Experiment

The other night MC Ice and I were cold. We needed something to warm us up. So we popped open a bottle of Syrah from South Africa that I'd been sent a while back (there's my disclosure, but as usual free wine doesn't guarantee a good review!). Because we're just so wild and crazy, we had another bottle of Shiraz from California (same grape, different name, and this was ALSO sent to me) and decided to do a little taste test. I don't want to be bitchy about this, but I've got a serious peeve where this wine is concerned. I hear it mispronounced ALL the time, so I want to clear it up here and ask that you PLEASE remember this, if nothing else from this post:

1. Syrah and Shiraz are different names for the same grape.
2. It is NOT Sy-RAZ or Sha-rah. PLEASE don't call it either of those things.
3. It's Syrah (See-RAH) or Shiraz (Shah-RAZ).

Ok, with that off my chest, some other important things....

Syrah is always the name in France, where the grape is originally from and where the flavors are more like savory herbs, black pepper, and horse farm (just trust me on this one and then get a bottle to sniff so you know what I mean!). Shiraz is always the name of the grape in Australia where the wines taste like blackberries with warm spices like cinnamon and nutmeg, and have secondary flavors like dark, wet soil.

In other parts of the world nomenclature is kind of weird. Producers use Syrah when they want to indicate a French style and Shiraz when they want to indicate an Australian style -- you'll see both used in Californian and South African wines, so just know it's all the same grape and the term used on the bottle is a tip off to the style.

Because I've gone into a lot of detail on California in prior posts, and because I've gone into detail on the producer, Concannon, in another post, I'm going to talk about the South African Mullineux from a semi-obscure area called Swartland, in the northwestern Cape area.

I make no excuses and don't try to hide my love for South Africa. I was there a few years ago and was fascinated by the beauty of the place, the kindness of the people, and the EXCELLENT food and wine. I'm pulling for the wines of South Africa to keep on keeping on -- improving quality and becoming more prominent players on the world wine scene.

The thing I think a lot people don't know about South Africa is that the country has been churning out wine since it was colonized in the 1650s. Because of that, there's been much debate about whether it is considered Old World (which right now is an exclusive European club) or New World (everywhere that isn't Europe). It's been classified New World both for stylistic reasons (it's fruitier and more bold in flavor than European wines) and for the fact that the political woes of South Africa (apartheid) put winemaking back nearly 100 years and now the country is tenaciously and aggressively trying to recover from its setback. Given the overhaul and modernization required by the industry, many New World winemaking techniques and ideas have permeated, so I think the whole debate on New v. Old World has been settled by the powers that be.

Regardless, the country makes good wine. And all its street cred comes from areas near the southernmost tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope. You may have heard of places like Stellenbosch, Franschoek, Elgin, or Walker Bay, where the wine critics who like to put arbitrary numbers on wine quality (oops, did I say that?) have concentrated their tasting. These places do make great wine and as time goes on they are only bound to improve. But there are some more remote areas that have great wine history too that we may want to keep an eye on...and Swartland (to which none of my texts have given much credence) is one of them.

40 minutes north of the breathtaking end of the world, Cape Town (yes this is a picture from my haul up the back of Table Mountain, which involved scaling rock face, climbing up rickety ladders, and squirming up tenuous chains, but that's a story for another time...), is the giant bread basket of South Africa: Swartland. It's known as "blackland" because in the summer the green foliage turns black due to lack of water.

This place is no stranger to wine...or to civilization. According to the cave paintings (and to the Mullineux web site!), bushmen lived here 150,000 years ago, farming the rich, fertile land. About 2000 years ago, the nomadic Khoi-Khoi came in and brought with them sheep and cattle. And 350 years ago Europeans came from the Southern Cape in search of meat and a place to grow oats, wheat, barley, etc., which was greatly lacking in the Cape's windy, maritime climate. Like every sad colonization story, the Khoi-Khoi freely traded with the Europeans, until eventually the latter took over the water supplies and farmlands and forced out the nomads.

But leaving aside all that cultural and political stuff, we're here to talk about wine. And the key to this story is that from very early on, as soon as Europeans set up settlement in Swartland, they also began viticulture. Although it took a backseat to more important stuff like growing grains and raising sheep and cows, little pockets cropped up and grapes were turned into wine.

Fast forward to more modern times and bam! a revolution has taken place in this area. As it turns out, Swartland is great for growing grains, but less great for viticulture. Producers have to carefully select sites to get good raw material for wine. The area is surrounded by mountains, and the soils from those mountains have provided an excellent environment, but don't look for Swartland to be a huge volume producer of great wine any time soon. The good areas are limited. That said, a few amazing producers have decided to try their hand at making high quality wines using amazing, old school techniques.

For instance, many do what's called dry farming here. What's that? Really just old-school farming -- you don't irrigate and you leave it to nature to provide water sources for the vines. What does that mean? Instead of shallow roots that have consistent access to water from drip irrigation (hoses that kind of leak water to the vines on a regular basis), the roots of these vines have to go way down deep to access water. The yields are low from these vines and they struggle -- a good thing in the wine world. Instead of being trained on trellises, the better producers also grow these vines in bushes, a very old method of growing vines that ripens vines slowly but well in warm, dry climates like Swartland (left). All these old school methods are also used in the Northern Rhone Valley of France, where the famous native red grape, Syrah, is king. And this grape takes the crown with the top producers in Swartland like Sadie Family Vineyards, the only Biodynamic producer in the area.

A word on Mullineux before I review the wine -- it's a pretty new property, started in 2007 by a husband and wife team near a mountain called Riebeck Kasteel. The Winery is laser focused on making just three wines -- a white blend, a straw wine (sweet wine, the grapes raisin on straw mats or some other method, and then you press out mostly sugar to get a sweet treat!), and Syrah.

Mullineux is minimalist in farming and they don't believe in a lot of winemaker monkeying, as I like to say. They rely on grapes, not oak, for primary flavors and the wines are unfiltered and unfined, which doesn't mean there's chunks of grape floating in them, but more that flavor is retained because the wine isn't subjected to clarification, which some believe strips out and homogenizes flavors.

I'll provide the review below, but for fun and illustration of the differences, I'm going to add an extra section, which is how it compared to the Concannon Shiraz. This wine is 3 times the price of the California wine but probably 10 or 15 times the quality. I don't think there is always a direct correlation between price and quality, but in this case, yeah, it is in a BIG way.

The Wine: Mullineux Syrah
Where It's From: Swartland, South Africa
The Grapes: 100% Syrah
Vintage: 2008
Price: $29.99

Color: With the risk of grossing you out, I'll say that the wine is so dark that it's like looking at a blood bag. Pigment galore - it was nearly opaque but still had a nice pink, watery edge. All this sounds ick, but a Syrah with this much richness, at minimum, indicates lots of fruity ripeness. This is pretty common color in warmer regions, where the sun allows the grapes lots of ripeness and pigment development.

Smell: If I may be slightly judgmental for a second, I wasn't expecting that much from this wine. Swartland is warm, there aren't a ton of producers from the area, and I was concerned this would be like an expensive Livingston Cellars, from Cali's Central Valley.

I'll admit it: I'm a chump. This wine was complex, intense, and many splendored! It smelled more like a Rhone Syrah than an Australian one -- leather, horse hair, and black pepper were more prominent than the ripe plum, and blackberry aromas. This is so obscure, but there's this smell of damp wood or marine air that I associate with older apartments in San Francisco (if you've smelled it, you know what I mean) -- I smelled that here. If that is completely out there, just think of damp wood, and dark, dry soil. Oh yeah, and deliciousness.

Taste: The wine was fruitier than expected -- lots of sour blackberry juice with a raisin/prune flavor. That barnyard, horsey smell kind of melded with the fruit and was complex (think a cheese that's a little funky) and gooooood! A little peppercorn and a baked bread flavor were on the finish -- super unique and savory. It had a little bit of an alcohol burn but the mouth-drying tannins were in check and everything was in great balance. This wine had a ton of character and stuck around long after I swallowed it.

Food: Because this wine is so complex, you'll need something a little simpler to go up against it. Hard cheeses like Parmesan or something flavorful like Gorgonzola would benefit from the spicy, earthy flavors of the wine. If you go light on the marinade and just do a vinaigrette with salt and fresh pepper, then grilled meats or veggies would be an ideal match. Heavy meat and a peppercorn rub = good things with this wine. Grilled portabella mushrooms, another hit.

Drink or Down the Sink?: Drink, drink, drink! What a nice, bold wine. I was thoroughly impressed by how multi-faceted this was and how it resembled French more than Australian wine.

Comparison with Concannon: Concannon's wine is called Shiraz, so I expected more unabashed fruit flavors than the restraint shown in the Mullineux wine. But from the get-go I knew I was wrong. The watery, lighter color didn't indicate a bolder wine. The grapey aroma was nothing like the rich, horsey, woodsy, black plum scents in the Mullineux. The Concannon also smelled to me like it was going to be watery -- there wasn't a whole lot going on. This isn't like most Shiraz I've had and it was quite the opposite of the depth and complexity of the Mullineux.

In contrast to the multi-layered flavors of the South African wine, the Concannon Shiraz reminded me of (I'm going to take you back or stretch your imagination if you don't know what this is) Hubba Bubba Blueberry flavored chewing gum. There was a touch of black pepper and a bit of mouth drying tannin, but this wine was just light plum fruit with some alcohol -- it seemed like the flavor was baked out of the grapes in the hot Cali sun and the vines may be in soils that aren't the best for the grape. Regardless of reason, the wine lacked all the nuance I found in the South African Syrah. The Concannon was palatable, and had characteristics of the Syrah/Shiraz grape, but when stacked up against the Mullineux, it paled.

Doing a "taste test" like this is fascinating and I'd recommend it to you so you can see for yourself how diverse regions can make a big difference in aroma, flavor, and overall deliciousness. It also helps you learn the range of flavors a grape has, and kind of the "bones" of the operation -- what it seems to always have in common.

What did I learn from this excuse for drinking a lot of Shiraz? I like complexity in my Syrah/Shiraz. Fruit alone is not enough for me -- I like the funk (horse, pepper, dirt) that the grape can possess. So, hot areas without diversity in soil types for me aren't going to do it. I will always maintain that quality is not always driven by price, but I do think it's driven by where the grapes are grown and I think super fertile areas like the San Francisco Bay/Livermore Valley are not at the top of my list when I shop for Syrah/Shiraz.

Comment on this post and let me know what you discover!