The Wine's the Thing
Mitch Kornfeld
2/18

For a Big Red, Think Petite

Greetings and salutations. It's still winter, and I'm going to be continuing my little talks about red wines. This week the subject is Petite Sirah, a good and under appreciated California red. Petite Sirah (sometimes spelled "Syrah") has a few things in common with Zinfandel. They're both big gutsy red wines, they're both from production varieties, not noble varieties, they're both from California to the virtual exclusion of anywhere else (even more so for Petite Sirah), they both have somewhat obscure origins, and they are both overachievers.

As for its obscure origins, this is the way I understand the situation. Petite Sirah comes from the Côtes du Rhone, as both of its parents are Rhone varieties, though it is not permitted in Côtes du Rhone wines. It is the same as the variety called "Duriff," in France, and it is a cross between a little known variety called Peloursin and the true Syrah (called Shiraz in Australia), the noble red Rhone variety. Duriff was the name of a plant breeder and researcher who was trying to develop a mildew resistant grapevine, and who succeeded at it. Petite Sirah isn't as successful as Syrah as a wine grape, but it is mildew resistant, and it is easier to grow.

Petite Sirah is a late-ripening variety, which was probably the main reason it didn't catch on in France. It's also a tannic variety and a productive variety and France already had enough varieties with those characteristics. When it got to sunny California the late ripening characteristic wasn't such a problem. It was a mainstay variety for the Italian immigrants in California in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries who appreciated its good qualities. It was hardy and productive and produced a big, hearty, and agreeable wine with good fruit. It still does. It doesn't have the complexity of Cabernet Sauvignon or Syrah, but it makes a very good wine that deserves to be better known.

Along with Zinfandel and Carignan it produced millions of gallons of California jug wines. The Italians in California planted it along with other grapes such as Alicante Bouchet, Carignan, and Zinfandel and made a wine from what's referred to as a "field blend." A few wineries such as Topolos and Trentadue still produce these wines. Petite Sirah also shows up in some Ridge Zinfandels, some of the very finest Zins there are. Look at the fine print and they often say something like this: "85% Zinfandel in a field blend with 10% Petite Sirah, 3% Carignan, and 2% Alicante Bouchet." The Petite is invariably the largest component of the non-Zin grapes. Presently and for about the last fifteen years Petite has seen much use as a grape to be blended with Syrah. As wineries made new plantings of Syrah and waited for them to produce (it takes about five years to get a commercial crop from a new vineyard), they used Petite Sirah to "stretch" what they had or could get of Syrah, apparently without ill effects on the wines. It's a good grape for making Port too, and obviously it's versatile, but its best use is probably as a 100% varietal.

Petite Sirah is tannic but it is also fruity, and one of its best qualities is that it is very good at holding its fruit. This makes it a good ager. Its ability to retain its fruit often makes it seem younger than it really is. It's great for playing "guess the year," with your friends. I have a Foppiano 1991 Napa Valley Reserve that I plan to open at a Rhone/Rhone-type tasting sometime in the twenty teens. I think the participants will be quite surprised to find out that they will be drinking a wine from the early nineties. The back label says they intended to make a Reserve bottling from the Napa Valley grapes but the quality of the resulting wine was beyond their expectations. I've seen many things on wine labels but that's the only time I ever saw that one. I see no reason to doubt them. I've always trusted Foppiano and I'm not going to stop now. The back label also said that it would be the last vintage of Petite Sirah from that vineyard as the vines were going to be grafted over to another variety. That brings up the complicated but essential subject of vegetative propagation. I won't get into it too much.

All the familiar wine grapes that we know and love, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Riesling, Merlot, Zinfandel, all of them, they all belong to the same species. In this case the name of the species is vitis vinifera, the wine bearer. It's usually referred to as vinifera. Within the same species different varieties can be grown on the same plant. If you had one apple tree in your backyard, say it was a Red Delicious tree, you could graft on a branch or two of Macintosh, or Gala, or Fuji apples if you wanted to, just for the variety. As long as it's the same species it's possible. You don't have to grow another tree and wait for it to start bearing your preferred type of apple. For vinifera you can graft over to a completely new variety and you don't have to wait the five years to get a crop of the new grapes. I don't know what that Petite Sirah vineyard became but if I had to guess I'd say it was Chardonnay.

It was about that time in the early nineties when the Inglenook brand, after over 100 years of operation, passed into the history books. The property was taken over by Francis Ford Coppola, who does an excellent job and has made it an even nicer place to visit, but he doesn't make Petite Sirah. I have no way of telling if that Napa Valley vineyard that Foppiano used for their 1991 Reserve had belonged to Inglenook but in my -- what shall I call it? -- personal mythology (you know that place inside where we are what we would like to be, President of the United States, centerfielder for the Yankees, a Bill Gates who's nice to the little guys, that sort of thing), in that place, I have the last bottle of Inglenook Petite Sirah. I have a fond remembrance of their Petite Sirahs. One of the oldest bottles in my collection is a 1984 Inglenook. I'm saving it for a special occasion, which I'm hoping will happen this summer. I'm sure, at almost seventeen years old, it will still be fine. This brings me to the story about the finest Petite Sirah I ever tasted. If you indulge me for a few minutes I promise to get back to recommending a few good producers.

This story involves my vacation in the Fall of 1978, most of which was spent in California, and to really appreciate the story you have to know what the burning California ballot issue was that year, something called the Briggs Amendment. To put it in a nutshell the Briggs Amendment would have allowed certain forms of discrimination against a certain class of California citizens. It was leading in the polls right up to the week before the election when the citizenry of California came to their senses and narrowly defeated it. It went down by something like 53 to 47, and it was never brought up again, and will surely never be brought up again, which shows we have made some progress. The kicker to this story could be construed as a derogatory remark directed towards the intended victims of Briggs, but let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. It was uttered in a state of inebriation by a world-class ham who would (and does) say just about anything for a joke. In fact he, my cousin Robert, was vehemently against the Briggs Amendment and enthusiastically voted against it. In fact all of my voting age relatives in California voted against it. I have good relatives. Now back to my 1978 vacation.

I think I arranged my plans in January, so it was just a lucky accident that I started vacation during the World Series. The first day of my vacation found me in Yankee Stadium in an excellent $25 scalped seat for game 4 vs. The Dodgers. It was a thrilling extra-inning affair where the tying and winning runs were driven in by Munson and Pinella, but what most people probably remember about the game was Reggie Jackson deliberately throwing a hip-check at the ball to get out of a rundown between first and second, and getting away with it. Reggie Jackson was one smart ballplayer.

I listened to game 5 while in an airplane flying to Los Angeles. It was an easy win for the home team. Game 6 found me in Dodger Stadium where I got a good seat for a then pricey $35. What I didn't know then was that for the next eighteen years I would be saying that I was at the deciding game of the last World Series that the Yankees won. It was definitely a well spent $35. Catfish Hunter started for the Yankees and after giving up a first pitch home run to Davey Lopes he settled down to notch the win. Brian Doyle had, I think, four hits, and Reggie Jackson bombed a ninth inning homer off of Bob Welch for insurance. It was one of those gone at the crack of the bat Piazza-like rockets that went about 450 feet. One of the things that is remembered from that Series is Bob Welch striking out Reggie in the ninth in an earlier game. (I think it ended Game 3 but I'm a little hazy all these years later.) The strikeout was used in a commercial or a Public Service Announcement. People forget that Reggie definitely got even with Welch. This is one of those examples of where perception became the reality.

Another example happened about ten days earlier in Fenway Park in the famous '78 playoff game. We remember Bucky Dent hitting his famous home run, but that home run did not win the game. It put the Yankees ahead to be sure, but the final score was 5 to 4 and run number five came courtesy of a top of the ninth home run into the centerfield bleachers by Reginald Martinez Jackson. They didn't call him "Mr. October" for nothing. For one more example I'll mention the perception that Cabernet Sauvignon is the world's best red wine grape. I think this perception happens to be true, but I do not think that it should have led to there being twenty times the acreage in California of Cabernet Sauvignon to Petite Sirah. Is Cabernet better than Petite? Absolutely. Is it twenty times better? Of course not.

After my stay in L.A., I went up to the San Francisco Bay area where I serendipitously caught a terrific Grateful Dead concert. I was goin' down the road (feelin' pretty good) listening to AM radio in my Rent-A-Wreck, the only company who rented to people who didn't have credit cards, when I heard a promo for the concert in Winterland that night. I hit the brakes, took a left, got to the venue and took advantage of good old Bill Graham's (bless him) policy of holding out tickets for the day of the show. There were special guests and I had a wonderful time. A perusal of the DeadBase listings shows I went on either Saturday October 21st or Sunday the 22nd. That would make my encounter with the Petite Sirah Sunday October 29th, just as the tide was turning against Briggs.

After S.F. I went to stay with my cousins Fran and Robert in the wilds of Mendocino County. They decided to take me to the then hot new place for wine and food, Domaine Chandon in the Napa Valley. Domaine Chandon is still wonderful and I recommend it highly. It's a beautiful place with excellent French cuisine. They serve their own (sparkling) wines at no mark-up, just the regular MSRP, and they give an excellent tour of their sparkling wine production facilities. We went for Sunday brunch. My recollection, which could be wrong, was that they charged the same thing for the all-you-can-eat brunch as the MSRP of the sparkling wines, which was $8.50 at the time. Maybe brunch was a little bit more, I do remember the sparklers at $8.50 though. (The wines are $15 now, which is pretty good considering a full 22 years have passed.) There were the three of us and a male friend of theirs, I can't remember his name, and their daughter, my cousin Rose, who was nine months old and completely lovely and charming. She still is lovely and charming. I remember patés and a three foot long salmon en croute with different sauces on the side. (Remember it is a well-known fact that fish get longer as time progresses.) This is where I first discovered my fondness for the Blanc de Noirs style of sparkling wine, a fondness that has never left me. None of us remembers exactly how many bottles of the bubbly we consumed, but we agreed that it wasn't excessive, four, or maybe five at the outside, probably four.

After a good couple of hours of indulgence at Domaine Chandon we adjourned to the parking lot where we indulged in another fine agricultural product of northern California. 1978 was an excellent year for wine in California, but it was excellent for other things too and we couldn't let our blood sugars get too high. Besides, I had to consult my winery guide and decide on a winery to visit where we could do some more drinking. The decision proved to be an easy one as Inglenook was the only place nearby that was open until 6PM and it was already about 5, so happily and giddily fortified we cruised up Highway 29 to venerable old Inglenook.

Inglenook used to produce a full line of wines and they let you taste about five or six of them. We dutifully tasted up the line, going from whites to reds, and from lighter to heavier, when we were presented with their 1974 Napa Valley Petite Sirah. 1974 was a great year for California wine. It wasn't the greatest year, but it came at a time when the interest of Americans in wine was increasing, and it was widely touted and it gained a great reputation. If it lacked true greatness, as some would suggest, it was at the very least an excellent year. It was the kind of year where it was hard to make bad wine. Inglenook's reds were always better than their whites but with the '74 Petite Sirah they outdid themselves. It was everything you could ask for in a red wine, rich, intense, concentrated, fruity, harmonious, lingering, and just delicious. Just wonderful stuff (and it carried a $5.79 list price as I recall). I took a taste and knew that I was holding a glassful of great wine, yet I said nothing. Why? Well, it was because I was in the presence of Robert Crawford, my cousin Fran's husband.

Robert's a bona fide expert. His father was the late Charles Crawford, who was for many years the Vice-President in charge of production for Gallo. Robert, who's been tasting since he was about eight, went to U. C. Berkeley for oenology (before they moved the program to Davis), worked for Gallo as a microbiologist, and worked for a few other wineries. In the end no winery would hire him because they were afraid he would steal their secrets and take them to Gallo, but that was never true, he just wanted to make good wine. (Gallo had a rather déclassé image in those days.) Back then when you went tasting with Robert no one would make any pronouncement about a wine before he did because they were afraid he might point out that the wine was flawed or was lacking in some way, and you didn't want to look like you didn't know what you were talking about. It's funny that I see the same thing when I take a group of friends to the Long Island wineries. No one will say anything before I do. I guess that's how you find out you really know something about wine. Keep reading this space and it could happen to you too. So there we were at the bar in Inglenook, and Robert, who has been accused of many things, but not knowing how to play to a crowd has never been one of them, tasted the Petite Sirah, turned to our merry assembled gathering and said, "Well, what can you say? Any more fruit and it would come under the Briggs Amendment."

Where's a drum kit when you need one? I guess you had to be there, but I'll always remember the wine. As for Petite Sirah producers, I've always had luck with older wineries that were making it way back when, and who have experience with it. Look for Foppiano of course, and Parducci, Trentadue, Concannon (they make a regular and a Reserve), and Ridge. Some newer wineries that are supposed to have good Petite include Bogle, Sean Thackery, and La Jota. Do try a Petite Syrah. They're good wines, and they are almost always good values. Next week I plan to talk about an even bigger red. See you then.

© Mitch Kornfeld 2001 All rights reserved

Send your comments or questions to...
mitchk@unionsquarejournal.com

Previously by Mitch Kornfeld...

Tannic Monsters from the ID (02/08/01)

New York Wine and Restaurant Deals (01/30/01)

Dad's Cardinal Zins and Other Clichés (01/20/01)

Some Basics for a Winter's Eve (01/12/01)

And if They're Spanish That's Fine (01/05/01)

Hello Carbon Dioxide (12/29/00)

Wines for Christmas (12/22/00)

Nouveau Beaujolais, Etc. (11/24/00)

Going to a Tasting 101 (12/01/00)