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Rhone varieties have generated a cultish enthusiasm for their spicy, forward fruit and saucy, this-ain't-no-Cabernet character when they were "discovered" in California in the mid 1990's.
Perhaps even more importantly, the Rhone wine boom encouraged winemakers to play with creative blends of grapes with unfamiliar names. After all, Chateuneuf du Pape has 13 constituents! Several of these efforts have truly rewarded both their creators and their consumers.
Salamandre's Syrahs, starting in 1996, and our subsequent blends of Syrah, Merlot, and Primitivo--our Menage a Trois--certainly owe a great homage to Rush to the Rhone. Does that make Salamandre a timid follower of trends, a lazy lamprey upon the pelagic cruiser of the marketplace, a sly sycophant to the Bold Rangers of Newness? Why, as a matter of fact: No!
Rather than numbly shuffle among the gathering crowd of emulators, we sent our explorer to the Rhone's wild, glacial source, long before it trickles tamely into France. In 1993, our daughter, Aimee, spent a year as an exchange student in Sion, Switzerland. Sion produces Switzerland's most prized white wines, grown in jealously guarded niches of soil on the flanks of the Alps on the headwaters of the Rhone. First dibs.
Aimee helped gather the 1993 vintage in Switzerland. The honored travail of lugging bulging baskets over steep slopes required no great adjustment for Aimee, who was abundantly familiar with small winery grunt work on our own Santa Cruz Mountain hillsides. This experience reinforced for her something that I believe to be a unifying and gracious aspect of wine and civilization.
When people pick and crush grapes--in any terrain, speaking any language, in any historical epoch--they share several precious things. The generations of the present roll up their sleeves together. We affirm our confidence in the future with a grinning respect for the generations past. The harvest honors the land and gently reinforces humility before the forces of nature. It asserts that people have the right to enjoy themselves every day. It's a great party.
Wells Shoemaker, May, 2002