2018 Desire Lines Griffin’s Lair Syrah

Griffin’s Lair is the vineyard that we first bought fruit from in 2015, the founding vineyard for Desire Lines – the vineyard that launched a thousand FedEx packages. Like previous vintages, the wine fermented un-inoculated with 50% whole cluster and a submerged cap through the first half of fermentation, pressed off just short of dryness, and put down to neutral large format barrels for 15 months before bottling. The wine tastes unmistakably like Griffin’s Lair, suffused with cherry, black tea, and bacon fat, all of which are cast in high relief by the cap submersion. The vineyard continues to amaze me by the way it bears the imprint of the vintage so clearly – we do practically the exact same thing in the winery each year, and yet the wine has a personality all its own year after year. The 2018 shares some of the pliancy, sinewy heft and briny personality of the 2015 (which has aged beautifully) leavened by a brightness and snap that calls to mind the 2016.
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