2018 Syrah

This set of wines from Tegan and Olivia Passalacqua is full of highlights. The biggest issue readers will face is having to choose among them. The 2018s benefit from a long, moderate growing season that yielded wines blessed with extraordinary fruit purity and tremendous depth, but with no excess weight, the only exceptions to that being the Mission and Cinsault which are, by their very nature, airy. As always, the focus is on own-rooted, dry-farmed heritage sites, some of which date back to the late 1880s/early1900s, and non-interventionalist winemaking. Most of the reds are done with 100% whole clusters (except the Mission, Cinsault and Zinfandel), but none of the wines show pronounced whole cluster character. Best of all, these wines offer unreal value in today's world.