Alain Paret St. Joseph "420 Nuits" 2003

[Thraz]

$16 at Sam's Wines on a 20% off everything sale this weekend.

Very good wine. Pepper and other spices on the nose and subtle red fruit on the palate, long finish, medium body with fine tannins. I threw out the bottle before reading the alcohol content, but it had no heat, I would guess less than 15% in spite of the vintage. Incidentally, now that we are a few years past and discussions of 2003 are not as heated, my experience has been that I have liked most of the northern Rhones from that vintage, and virtually none of the southern Rhones, which I have all found too raisiny for my taste.

This wine has another interesting feature - from Paret's webesite it says it is not 100% syrah: it is made of syrah and "serine," which they call "old syrah." From some research on that grape (which I had never heard of), serine's nature is not well known. Some people say it used to be just another name for syrah, others a clone of syrah, others yet an ancestor of syrah. Some say it is more widely planted in Cote-Rotie, where it is responsible for the smoky character of that appellation - so apparently, a lot of Cote-Roties are not just syrah and viognier, there seems to be a lot of serine thrown in. Also, this seems to show that the locals think syrah and serine are different. Anyway, perhaps this is well-known but it was not to me. After reading a bunch of articles referring it (a lot of them with a focus on petite sirah), I can't say I am much clearer on the matter, but it's always fun to discover something new (to me) in an area that I thought I knew relatively well. Here are a couple of interesting articles I came across in that research:

http://www.winelabels.org/artsirah.htm
http://www.beveragebusiness.com/archives/article.php?cid=1&eid=22&aid=174