2013 Foxen Winery Syrah Tinaquaic Vineyard Santa Maria Valley

Côte-Rôtie “Volar de Noche” on the Santa Barbara Coast

Over the past several years, we’ve focused considerable attention on the Syrahs grown on the Santa Barbara coast. Unlike the more bombastic renderings coming out of Paso Robles, where torrid summers tend to blister fragile clusters and make for Port-like reds, the top Syrah vineyards in the south benefit from the east-west orientation of the coastal range and the cool winds that gust steadily off the Pacific.

Dick Doré and Bill Wathen’s Tinaquaic Vineyard was planted in 1989 on a “shoestring budget.” During evening hours, as the story goes, the Foxen Boys gathered canes from already-pruned cuttings from historic Santa Maria Valley in Dick’s old orange pickup truck. It’s for this reason that Doré and Wathen affectionately refer to their special cane-collection method as “Volar de Noche” or “fly by night.”

Dry-farmed since it’s inception and planted on its own rootstock — rare in America, but the rule of thumb in Côte-Rôtie — the vines at Tinaquaic have extraordinarily deep root structure, making them all but impervious to heat and drought conditions. While many of the winegrowers we visited complained that the dry scorching 2013 heat really put their vines to the test, when you taste the black fruit purity of Foxen’s fabulous 2013, it’s clear that Tinaquaic not only didn’t suffer, it flourished. Others picked early, hoping to avoid Paso’s Port-like complexion, but Doré and Wathen took their time, delaying the call to harvest until the first week of October, when under glorious blue skies, they picked ultra-sweet berries infused with fine acid and tannic structure.

Harvested by hand between October 4th and October 9th, yields were just 2 tons per acre. Whole berries were destemmed into open-top fermenters. During the 15-day fermentation, punch-downs were done by hand twice per day. After a 20-month stay in French and Hungarian barrels and puncheons, 40% of which were new, the 2013 Tinaquaic Syrah was bottled without fining or filtration on June 24, 2015, then cellared over a year before release.

Opaque purple-black. Explosive aromas of crushed black fruits and black cherry, black pepper and violets. Rich, dense and compact, briary and almost chewy in texture, filled with black- and red-fruit preserves, finishing with terrific northern Rhône persistence and tension. Drink now — if you’re half out of your mind — or lay down one of the most irresistible California reds of the vintage until the mid-2020s.

Only 10 cases available today. $48 at the tasting room or just $43 today on WineAccess. Shipping included on 4.

• ABV 14.90%
• Enjoy right away
• % Syrah