Gramercy Cellars

“smoked meat, black olive tapenade, and mezcal”

Greg Harrington and I go back a ways. When I started studying and taking sommelier exams, he would occasionally taste with me and give me pointers. Greg is one of the best blind tasters I’ve ever seen. An absolute phenom. To have his input in crucial stages of my development as a sommelier was absolutely pivotal. We’ve become friends over the years and I’ve always been a fan of his wines at Gramercy Cellars, which he and his wife Pam founded in 2005.

“STEMS RULE” is plastered across their t-shirts at the winery. It’s a nod to a winemaking technique that’s decidedly old world. When you throw whole grape bunches into the fermenter and foot-stomp them, you get a range of flavors that you’d otherwise miss out on. Stems create a whole range of funky, savory, salty notes in the finished wine.

When you lift this glass up, expect that. This wine has 100% percent stem inclusion, so all the bunches and grapes were fermented together. Embrace the funk. There’s salted plum and boysenberry fruit here, and notes of smoked meat, charcoal, black olive tapenade, and mezcal. Seriously, mezcal came to mind first when I opened this bottle and poured a glass. Very few syrahs veer so far into smoky territory that they smell like mezcal, but this one does. And it’s pretty amazing.

The other cool thing about this wine is its age. You’re getting to taste a Washington Syrah with seven years of bottle age on it, which really brings out those funky, earthy notes. Curiously, I helped out at Gramercy during the 2013 harvest, and I was able to do punchdowns on some of this actual wine. So you’re tasting a wine that I helped to produce!

Gramercy has never released one of their wine club wines outside their own club, so the fact that they’re sharing with Crunchy Red Fruit is a big deal! I’m more than thrilled to have this wine as part of release #1. There were only 178 cases of this wine made, and some of those are just for you! Read more about Gramercy Cellars’ description of this 2013 Oldfield Syrah here.