2000 Syrah Wylie-Fenaughty El Dorado County

My visit with Steve Edmunds gave me considerable food for thought this year. Edmunds is a French wine fanatic who for years has made Rhone-style wines without any new oak or clarification prior to bottling. But after discovering incipient microbial problems in a couple of his 2000 cuvees he took the decision to sterile-filter all of his 2000s. A year or more following the bottling, Edmunds finds them to be the most aromatically complex and precise wines he has made to date, and they were indeed delicious in my tastings. The Edmunds St. John 2000s will certainly be an interesting set of wines to follow. They may be a strong argument against those winemakers and wine critics who believe, simplistically, that all filtration is bad and non-filtration is good. There are those who believe that it is possible to filter a wine without stripping it of aromatic interest, texture and length, and who maintain that unfiltered bottles are bacteriological time bombs.