2010 Syrah (Sonoma Coast)

This is another exciting, captivating set of wines from Wind Gap and Pax Mahle. Readers who have not yet discovered Wind Gap owe it to themselves to do so. These are some of the most gorgeous, nuanced wines being made in California today. Mahle continues to experiment with concrete and larger casks, both of which seem ideally suite to a minimalist approach that seeks to draw out the maximum expression of each of these sites. The Wind Gap wines achieve that elusive balance of depth without excess heaviness. Once again, I was deeply impressed with the range I tasted, and can't recommend these wines highly enough.

Visitors to Sebastopol's swanky new food-and-wine theme park, The Barlow, will have a chance to sample and purchase Wind Gap wines, since Pam and Pax Mahle have moved their winery to the facility and set up a tasting room as well. The Pax wines will be made in the Historic Wine Building in Forestville, which has been Wind Gap's home since the beginning, in 2007, and Mahle is excited at the chance to show a distinction between the labels by having them operate independently from each other. "When they're being made and shown in the same place it can get a little confusing and this solves that issue," he said. In addition, Mahle has taken on investor Charles Banks as a partner in Wind Gap while retaining Pax as the Mahles' own label. 2011 "was a year where we basically watched the vines play out in slo-mo," he told me. "We like slow sugar buildups as much as or more than anybody but '11 was ridiculous. It was like winter moved into fall, with a couple of weeks of spring." Mahle is even more committed than ever to using concrete eggs for fermentations "because of the texture, the mouthfeel that they bring and the way the wines develop a more filled-in mid-palate while staying elegant."