Que Syrah, Shiraz?

by Maggie Bernat Smith

Are you one of the many confused wine drinkers out there that doesn't understand why some wines are labeled Syrah and some are labeled Shiraz? Lets do some myth busting and work this out!

Syrah and Shiraz are the same grape just different styles. Syrah has been around for....lets just say forever; and then here comes this Shiraz character appearing sometime around the late eighties! It was a new, exciting, and cool-sounding grape type that burst onto the scene, and people have been talking about ever since.

Lets look at Syrah first. Syrah traditionally comes from the Rhone Valley France (due south of Burgundy). The Northern Rhone Valley is where Syrah has its spiritual home. You may not know it but when you pick up a bottle of Cotes-du-Rhone, that you are actually buying Syrah. Up the price point a bit and you'll see names of villages like Saint Joseph or Hermitage, these wines are still Syrah just from specific villages in the Rhone and are known for a more masculine type of Syrah. Just like most places in the old world (France, Italy, Germany, Spain), the Rhone Valley names their wines after the place that the grapes come from; the grape is not as important as the wines origin.

If you pick up a traditional bottle of Cotes-du-Rhone or Cotes-du-Rhone Villages, you can most likely expect a medium-bodied wine, red fruits such as cranberry, raspberry and cherry, some black pepper spice and undertones of sagebrush. It's a great every day drinking wine and pairs wonderfully with lamb dishes.

Now the Aussies! Sure they have been growing "Shiraz" since the early 1800's, but we never really saw any of their wines till the late eighties. There are a couple of myths on how this name came about. One is from the ancient city Shirazi in Persia where the famous Shirazi wine was produced; but Shiraz as we know it today cannot actually be traced to this. There are documents of other countries calling this grape "Shiraz", but it's the Aussies that made it famous.

Australia being a much hotter climate then the Northern Rhone and even the central coast of California (where they produce a Syrah similar to the Rhone style), creates a much different style of this grape. Australia Shiraz is a very different animal then what is described above. It's a much more jammy, rounder, plumper, blackberry-filled, chocolatey, oaky, but still peppery, type of wine. So when you are shopping around town, and hopefully at the Noble Grape, pay attention to the labeling; this is the winery giving you hints to what style of Syrah/Shiraz they are making.