Cayuse Vineyards’ Syrah Bionic Frog: 2000 – 2014 

BY STEPHEN TANZER | OCTOBER 10, 2017

First things first: Christophe Baron is the Bionic Frog. That’s the nickname the Australians gave this indefatigable Frenchman when he worked a harvest there in the mid-1990s and the name he chose for what would become one of Washington’s top cult wines in the decade that followed. Baron showed me a complete vertical tasting back to year one (2000) in Seattle at the end of July. The wines stunned with their richness, complexity and Old World wildness. This is truly one of America’s handful of great Syrahs — and it’s not Baron’s only wine on my short list.

From France to the New World

Baron, whose extended family owns 60 hectares of vineyards in Champagne and produces wine under their Champagne Baron Albert label, first came to Walla Walla in 1993 as an intern at Waterbrook Winery. Subsequently, he served an internship at Adelsheim Vineyard in the Willamette Valley, then worked the 1995 harvest in Australia’s Barossa Valley. His next stop was eastern Romania, where he worked for a British wine company in late 1995. As he wasn’t interested in taking over the family Champagne business, Baron then returned to the U.S. with the idea of buying land and planting Pinot Noir in Willamette Valley. But on his next visit to Walla Walla, he decided that the area he describes as “the stones,” located on the Oregon side of the Walla Walla Valley delimited area, would be his future. (This area was granted AVA status in early 2015 as “The Rocks District of Milton-Freewater.” But the fiercely independent Baron wants no part of this new appellation, as he believes it’s an overly political construct involving excessively rigid TTB rules. “And they’re cobblestones, not rocks,” he has always maintained.) 

At the time, there had been no commercial vineyards for 40 years in this area. Blue Mountain Cellar had been making Cinsault there, which they called “Black Prince,” but a severe freeze in November of 1956 wiped out most of the apple, cherry and plum orchards in Walla Walla Valley, along with its grape vines. Baron’s intention was to create the first “modern-day vineyard” in the stones.

Coccinelle Vineyard's cobblestone-rich soil. Photo credit: Andrea Johnson

Baron planted the 10-acre Cailloux vineyard in March of 1997, then added Coccinelle (a 4.5-acre parcel of which 3.7 are now under vine) and En Cerise (10 acres) in 1998, all on their own roots. He then added En Chamberlin (10 acres) in 2000, with the vines grafted onto phylloxera-resistant rootstock, then created the high-density, seven-acre Armada vineyard in 2001. Since those early years, Baron has made major additional investments in Walla Walla Valley, including the La Patiencia vineyard north of Armada (the No Girls wines are made by Baron’s “assistant vigneronne,” Elizabeth Bourcier) and his Horsepower project, from the densest vineyard in Walla Walla Valley, planted at 3 feet by 3 feet and worked with a horse. His most recent undertaking is a 2.2-acre Syrah vineyard he planted in 2011 on a slope in the foothills of the Blue Mountains that’s so steep the vines must be worked with a winch. The 2014 bottling of this new wine (called Hors Catégorie), which I tasted on the same day as the Bionic Frog vertical, would give a topnotch Hermitage a run for its money.