2009 Syrah Bedrock Vineyard Ancient Vine Sonoma Valley

When I surveyed the line-up of wines that Morgan Twain-Peterson had set up for our annual tasting I had to remark that he hadn't quite yet found a brake pedal for building his portfolio. "That's true," he replied, "but I've started to gain some focus for the sort of vineyards that I want to work with and how I should approach the fruit." For now? "Yeah, for now." It's pretty interesting to see what a young (30 years old) and inquisitive winemaker can produce as he pokes his way around the vineyards and varieties of northern California. Having his old-timer father Joel Peterson (Ravenswood) looking over his shoulder clearly doesn't hurt, but most of the Bedrock wines push more boundaries than his dad's. Joel told me that he was "sort of in awe" of what's going on in Sonoma these days, "with people wanting to work with varieties that used to be torn out, planting in cold places that nobody sane would have tried to grow vines in in my day, and doing old-school winemaking that was out of style two generations ago." Morgan's collection is, as usual, an intriguing, slightly idiosyncratic but uniformly high-quality group of wines that, fortunately, are priced in a way that allows intrepid wine-lovers to check out one of California's new wine pioneers at relatively pain-free prices.