Holy Schist | 2007 La Vendemia St Joseph

A two-barrel, centurion-vine syrah production; gentle yet edgy and rather exciting!

The nose is unmistakably stem-retentive. It’s pure and smoky with a touch of violet, oil, pine and some olive. It’s decidedly old-school in the best sense; its real wine of the earth material, full of true local authenticity. The structure is sinewy, tight with pure bramble and black raspberry fruit adding the flesh to a fine-boned frame of ripe fruit tannin with the tannin leached from ripe-stems adding a fundamentally complex framework for the fruit and acids to duck and dive. It’s a provocative style of wine that the young duo may struggle to replicate in a cooler vintage. Its nervy, graceful and finishes with excellent clarity, clearly stylistically close to Reymond Trollat's (the vineyards legendary retired owner - see below) traditional expression of syrah.

The Clos St. Joseph vineyard has only 1000 vines. Its old, crusty syrah, planted on the schist and granite in Aubert at St-Jean-de-Muzols. There is only about 8cm of topsoil with hard granite underneath, so with solid rock underfoot, the skinny vines don’t have much wood to show for their century of life. The grapes are hand-picked, and in the traditional way, no de-stemming is carried out. The skins and stems are all left with the wine for 1 month to give richness, flavour and extract. There are no pumps used and the winemaking could not be simpler.

We first met Shane McKerrow working as a “cellar rat” in the cave of probably the worlds greatest shiraz producer, Domaine J-L Chave, who was, at that moment, racking fine Hermitage wine, trying not to spill a precious drop.

He and wife Claire later spoke of their own 100yo white vineyard that used to belong to a legendary vigneron Raymond Trollat [for an in-depth explanation, see John Livingston-Learmonth’s “The Wines of the Northern Rhone”], their tiny “Clos St. Joseph” shiraz vineyard that is even older, and their plans to make natural, essential and “honest” wines using all the knowledge, hard work and experience they could muster.

For lovers of great northern Rhone wines, they have released a pair of 2007 wines that are not only stunning and intellectually stimulating, but are now available in Australia [the entire production of 90 cases!].

Nic@