2008 Rasa Vineyards Syrah Reserve Principia

Rasa’s 2008 Syrah Reserve Principia manages to display slightly more refined tannin and harmoniously sweet oak influence than its similarly sourced 2007 counterpart (for more on which, see my accompanying review of that wine). The emphasis here is still on bitter-edged concentration of black fruits, green herbs, and tar, with obvious wood inflections, but there is a pleasantly cooling and cleansing sense of mintiness amid the darkness of implosively concentrated berries and tar. This wine makes a case for its approach that is powerful in both flavor intensity and in the sense reflected in the Naravanes’ use of logical and mathematical guiding concepts, namely inasmuch as that which was to have been demonstrated by it has been, powerfully! I suspect this will well outlast the corresponding 2007 and remain valid for at least the next 4-5 years. Rasa was begun in 2007 by Indian-born Markrand (a.k.a. Pinto) and Yashodhan (Billo) Naravane, who abandoned computer science and high tech for a degree in oenology and viticulture at Davis and an opportunity to pursue his passion for wine in Walla Walla, where the brothers purchased a cobbled 28 acres whose early plantings will soon come on line. The Naravanes – who are assisting several other fledgling wineries in the area – are almost infectiously enthusiastic and have already attracted enormous critical acclaim, so I wish I could be just as enthusiastic about their early wines. There is a promising sense of adventurousness at this address – and most of the Naravane’s many bottlings are as yet in less than 200-case quantities. Most of their reds receive prolonged pre-fermentative cold soaks; several days post-fermentative maceration; and long elevage. The examples I tasted, while uniformly very ripe and concentrated, frequently veered toward dryingly high tannin, volatility, resinous oakiness and alcohol, the best of them being sappy and intense, but the typical wine massive, stolid and graceless. The Naravanes took trouble to present most of those reds both from freshly opened bottles and 24-96 hours after decantation, and the latter were usually marginally preferable, in which case it became the more influential on my eventual tasting notes and assessments. (What Naravanes term a “sister label” – PB – that will include wines rejected for their main portfolio, is nonetheless marketed alongside of their other releases, so The Wine Advocate has treated it for purposes of our database as part of Rasa.) Tel. (509) 252-0900