Reaching Back in the Red Rooster Syrah Bank

Boo and I would normally have headed up to the Okanagan for this weekend. Red Rooster winery had scheduled its annual Harvest Party for the winery's Adopt-A-Row "parents" - a title that Boo and I have happily claimed for a good many years now. It's a great little weekend. I thoroughly enjoy picking the vintage's grapes (even if we're only "farm boys" for a couple of hours at most) and there never seem to be enough grapes to satiate the gathered pickers.

Unfortunately, we'd already made plans to attend another annual mainstay in our calendar before the winery weekend was announced. 

As we were destined to be naughty, absentee parents this year, I thought we could at least open a bottle of Red Rooster wine in an effort to pay homage to the adopted babies we so callously abandoned.

1453.  2005 Red Rooster Syrah (VQA Okanagan Valley)

Having added probably as many - if not more - Red Rooster wines to The List than any other single winery, I'm going to take advantage of the fact that I've probably written more about Red Rooster than I have of any other winery as well. If you haven't been reading the blog all along and want to take a refresher course in the Red Rooster winery, I'd highly recommend that you just click onto the post I wrote about them in preparing to attend the 2013 Wine Bloggers' Conference this past June. If I say so myself, I think it covers a few bases.

I will say that, before opening the bottle, I wondered a bit about the staying power of the wine. Red Rooster hasn't necessarily been known for the biggest of red wines and eight years can be seen as pushing the envelope on BC reds. Our wineries haven't been making quality wines but two decades and most juries are still out when it comes to making a decision on the ageability of our wines.

Luckily, our bottle still had some life to it. The colour was still a deep purple but the wine was taking on a bit of brackish tone. The nose, however, was beautiful - with a big ripe blackberry note just exploding from the glass.

The taste wasn't quite so fruity or expressive. There was still plenty of acidity - and maybe that overwhelmed the remaining fruit a bit - but the brightness of the acid subsided some the longer the bottle was open and the dark fruit shone through a bit more.

All in all, we were quite happy with the bottle. As the majority of Red Rooster wines are made with purchased fruit, the provenance of the wine is not always apparent. I did find some winery tasting notes that stated that these Syrah grapes were sourced from a single vineyard that only brought in six tons of Syrah - enough to produce a whopping 350 cases.

I'm thinking this might have been one of the last remaining bottles. Too bad. I wouldn't say no to  another pour or two.