Thursday, April 30, 2009

Dry Stack Cellars Marie's Block Syrah 2006

From the Bennett Valley - the newest Sonoma AVA - this syrah is very big and very bold. A measly 300 cases of this supremely dense blackish purple darker than concord grape juice wine was produced. While this style of wine is going a bit out of fashion, I still highly respect winemakers that can pull off a ballsy New World syrah without making it syrupy, overly sweet, or one dimensional. This is just such a wine.

With a rich meaty nose, the toffee and stewed black fruits complimented the chocolate, cherry, and coffee aromas that made this smell like a Willy Wonka experiment gone right. The palate was somewhat sweet up front, but very dry in the back end, with proper tannic grip. This is quite alcoholic and extracted, but its concentration is superb and it sits on the good side of the cusp of overdone wine. This is in almost every way a bruiser (albeit with just enough of a soft heart to garner our sympathies), and is clearly an American wine made for high fat American food.

Very Good+
$38 at North Berkeley Wine Merchants

2 comments:

Sylvia Zygalo said...

what about the bottle? what color was it? did the wine have a cork or a screw top? what paper was the label made out of? tree-less or post-fiber? was the ink toxic or non?

just bugging ;) excellent review. the wine sounds amazing.. too bad it's about 70$ here

Shea said...

Haha - nice one. But check out the photo for answers to most of your questions! :)