2018 Syrah

The New Approach

In 2018, after rebranding as The Purple Habit, the club began buying fruit directly from the Fielding Hills Winery, gaining professionally managed access to its Riverbend Orchard on the Wahluke Slope outside Mattawa, Washington. 

 

This vintage marks the beginning of a new approach to club wine by leveraging the expertise of the winery staff surrounding harvest timings and the logistics necessary to pack and ship the fruit from Washington to British Columbia.

 

By moving oversight and management of harvest and logistics, the club is better able to focus on crush, fermentation and winemaking.

The Journey

The 2018 Syrah was bottled on May 9, 2020, and is a finely integrated expression of mature fruit balanced with soft tannins, acidity and alcohol.  Spend a bit of time pondering its inky colour and your senses may detect some aniseed  on the nose, followed on the palette with flavours of blackberry, liquorice, spice and pepper.

 

Over twenty months, numerous steps and processes were involved to craft this wine.  

Technical Stuff

• 2018 was a very smoky year in the Okanagan; however, as Mattawa is nearly 500km south of Osoyoos, very little smoke affected the grapes.  Only two day of smoke were reported
  
  
• Pre-harvest testing revealed fruit to be roughly 26 degrees Brix (sugar content) with a very acceptable pH of 3.7
  
  
• Harvest took place on September 24, and the club grapes were packed in 500 pound cardboard totes and shipped by reefer to Fort Langley for crush
  
  
• The fruit was cold soaked for four days, followed by eleven days of fermentation before pressing on October 10
  
  
• Malolactic fermentation concluded on December 6
  
  
• Aging took place for seventeen months in a combination of new and neutral French oak barrels, each racked every five months
  
  
• 14.3% alc./vol.  TTA 5g   pH 3.9