Red Car Estate Vineyard Syrah 2018
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Winemaker Notes
This wine is incredibly aromatic with notes of violet, plum, anise, black fruits, white pepper and dates.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Complex and structured, this is an incredibly impressive and memorable wine, made from coastal fruit. With a peppery beginning, it unveils a thickness of tangy red berry, tight-grained tannin and oak, with mineral-driven intrigue built around focused and fresh acidity.
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Wine & Spirits
Though the Red Car Estate is only 3.7 miles from the Pacific, it’s protected enough by the coastal ridges to ripen syrah. This 2018 delivers a spicy pink peppercorn bite, then lays out its cool saturation of purple, velvet-textured fruit and coastal forest scents. Fermented with ambient yeasts, it delivers layers of complexity softened by some cocoa-rich tannins. This should evolve well over the next several years.
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Wine Spectator
Structured and well-framed, with detailed dark plum, spiced cinnamon and savory forest floor accents, finishing with lively acidity and snappy tannins. Drink now.
Other Vintages
2014-
Suckling
James
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Red Car was founded in 2000 when Mark Estrin, Carroll Kemp and Richard Crowell produced 50 cases of wine from a single ton of Syrah grapes in a Culver City garage. In a nod to their Los Angeles roots, the new venture was named Red Car after the trolley line that ferried riders across the region for the first half of the twentieth century.
In 2004, they purchased 125 acres of land and began developing vineyards in the wild coastal ridges north of Sonoma County’s Bodega Bay, a region now known as the Fort Ross-Seaview AVA. Here, the interplay of warm sunshine, cool Pacific breezes and sandstone soils could yield the age-worthy wines of structure and complexity that had captured their imagination.
Today, under the direction of viticulturist, Greg Adams, and winemaker, Tanner Scheer, Red Car farms five dramatic vineyards including Heaven & Earth, Zephyr Farms, Mohrhardt Ridge, Hagan, and The Estate. This rugged terrain's coastal influence—where the Pacific fog filters in daily through giant redwoods until warm sunshine sends it back out to the sea—provides perfect growing conditions for their hallmark style: perfumed aromatics, bright fruit, crisp texture and uplifting acidity. Red Car is passionately committed to producing wines of purity and focus that express the authentic varietal character and terroir of each unique coastal vineyard site. At the core, Red Car is a small, independent farming operation committed to conservation and sustainability.
Marked by an unmistakable deep purple hue and savory aromatics, Syrah makes an intense, powerful and often age-worthy red. Native to the Northern Rhône, Syrah achieves its maximum potential in the steep village of Hermitage and plays an important component in the Red Rhône Blends of the south, adding color and structure to Grenache and Mourvèdre. Syrah is the most widely planted grape of Australia and is important in California and Washington. Sommelier Secret—Such a synergy these three create together, the Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre trio often takes on the shorthand term, “GSM.”
On the far western edge of the larger Sonoma Coast appellation, the Fort Ross-Seaview AVA hugs right up against the Pacific coast. Vineyards, planted at rugged elevations between 920 to 1,800 feet, occupy only two percent of the total land in the AVA. Fort Ross-Seaview growers believe that the region boasts an ideal mix of sunshine, cool air and beneficial stress for producing high quality Chardonnay and Pinot noir.