2008 Ojai Syrah Cuvée Henry Daniel

The second iteration of this cuvée, the 2008 Syrah Cuvée Henry Daniel (named for Adam Tolmach's son) is still an impenetrably opaque ruby-black, unwinding in the decanter and glass with a youthful bouquet of crushed currents, blackberry, bay leaf and burnt sage, with a subtle framing of nutty oak on the upper register. On the palate, the wine is full-bodied, powerful and—in Tolmach's phrase—bombastic, with an ample core of ripe fruit, an imposing chassis of fine-grained tannins that's beginning to soften, and a formidable payload of extract. Importantly, it also possesses the balance to support all that substance. "At the time I was still stuck on extracting every last bit of character from those grapes," says Tolmach, and I suspect that the 2017 rendition of this cuvée will reveal more complexity and detail at the same age, but it's still a formidable bottle of Syrah with a good two decades of longevity—and, I suspect, its best days—ahead of it.