2007 Syrah (Sonoma Coast)

Nobody can accuse Pax Mahle of taking the easy road since he started Wind Gap. His wines at Pax had actually begun to turn away from size over finesse the last couple of years he was running his own, eponymous label. There's plenty of experimenting going on here, from varieties and vineyard sites to fermentation practices and aging regimens. This is one wild set of wines and many of them will perplex those who have built their opinion of Mahle's work based on what he was making five years ago. Mahle told me that he's "looking at the iconic producers of my favorite wines, trying to figure out why they're more interesting than the other guys. You can learn a lot from looking at the best but that's where it stops. I'll never make an Allemand wine because I'm not him and I'm not working with Cornas, but that's sure a model worth emulating." He reckons that he can get away with working with oddball, virtually extinct varieties like trousseau gris and with making old-wave skin-contact white wines like his pinot gris (which in fact is more pink in hue than many "real" roses) because "I'm working at a scale that lets me do things that I could never do if I had to worry about massive distribution or crowd appeal. It's pretty cool to be able to do what actually turns me on."