This is the most epic version of this cuvée. It’s the first time we’ve bottled a pure Syrah from this parcel. Previous wines have always included a significant amount of the adjacent Grenache. The Grenache brings perfume, levity and delicacy, but it also hides the trajectory of Syrah’s power. The 2018 vintage produced incredibly dense wine. The wines are not overtly fruity, high in alcohol or sugar, but they fermented slowly, have substantial tannins and took a long time to resolve themselves both in the fermenter and the barrel. This wine spent nearly 100 days fermenting on the skins whole cluster before being racked to four old 500 liter barrels for aging. We’ve typically bottled Lunasa at two years of age (the 2019 was also an exception and that very delicate wine was bottled at just 12 months). This wine required a full three years of aging in cask to resolve its tannin and harmonize the aromatics catalyzed by the long maceration. The resulting wine is baroque in scale and style. It’s closest in style to luxury cuvée’s of Cote Rotie and Hermitage from a warmer vintage, but achieves this without resorting to new wood, artificial manipulations of yield or extreme extraction techniques in the fermenter.