Big Syrahs for a winter stew

Friends were in town to see “The Gates” in New York’s Central Park and would be coming to dinner on Saturday night. A cold, fresh blast of mid-winter had put things back on track as far as the weather was concerned. For the food, our thoughts gravitated toward something from the hearty stew department, with appropriate wines, of course.

The meal would be a Moroccan-inspired lamb tagine, simmered for a couple of hours with dried ginger, cilantro, parsley and cayenne pepper, and finished for 15 minutes in the oven with raisins, cut-up green apples and the exotic, apple-like fruit known as quince, which I managed to find (at $2 each) at the gourmet market around the corner.

Before deciding on the stew, thoughts of Pinot Noir had been going through my mind. The film “Sideways” has caused a minor explosion of interest in the wine, as you may have heard, and I have no doubt that California Pinot Noir, after all the hype, will get the award for Best Supporting Wine at the Oscars this weekend. But this was not a dinner for Pinot Noir, whose delicate flavors would have been swallowed up by the assertive tastes of the lamb stew.

It became clear that a bolder wine was in order, a wine like Syrah, with its dark fruit and spice. After reviewing Firestone’s very good 2002 Santa Ynez Valley Syrah ($18) a few weeks ago, there were others I had on hand and wanted to try. “We’re going to do a horizontal tasting of Syrahs,” I announced. “What the heck is a horizontal tasting?” my wife retorted, in the tone and with the look that wine people sometimes get when they dip into “wine speak.”

“It’s when you taste a number of wines from the same vintage,” I explained. I chose four Syrahs from 2002 — one from France, two from California and one from South Africa. We wrapped the bottles with red construction paper borrowed from our children’s art supply stash and numbered them one through four.  I thought it would be fun to taste the wines “blind.”

Our friends arrived. We began eating and tasting. The lamb tagine, served over couscous, was a beautifully aromatic blend of spicy and sweet. One wine was eliminated almost immediately. It was the French Syrah, a Crozes-Hermitage from the northern Rhône, which was simply too lean and austere for the dish. The other three, as it turned out, matched very well.

These were muscular wines, each characterized by intense and delicious dark-berry fruit and spice, but beyond that quite different in style. Rusack Vineyards’ Syrah from Santa Barbara County (the grapes were mainly from the Santa Ynez Valley) was bright and pretty, its fruit evoking cassis and cherry with touches of vanilla and cocoa. It was the most fruit-forward of the wines, showed the least amount of oak and was the “lightest” in character. It is priced well at $25 and is available from the winery at www.rusackvineyards.com.

Merryvale’s Napa Valley Syrah, at $35, was deep, spicy and herbal, defined by blackberry and mocha notes. Oak was more present in this one, and the tannins gave it a “chewiness” that I liked as part of a long finish. A good acid level brought balance and prevented the wine from being ponderous. Limited production; you can find more information at www.merryvale.com.

The most unusual Syrah was from a small winery called The Foundry in South Africa’s Paarl region in the western Cape Province. This was the most sophisticated of the wines and had the heaviest presence of oak, which punctuated the dark fruit with an intriguing smoky layer that reminded me a little of Scotch. The smoke brought an interesting counterpoint to the sweetness of the lamb tagine. At $39, this was an original wine, imported by Cape Classics.

There’s another thing about these excellent Syrahs. With quite a bit left in the bottles from our dinner, I continued to taste them over the next couple of days. They only got better as they opened up and evolved with continued exposure to air. They are not inexpensive, so leaving some for the next night, if you have the discipline, will help you amortize the cost while continuing to enjoy them. Just don’t forget to make enough of your own wonderful winter stew for the leftovers.

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