On our last trip up to the foothills, we stopped in at Cantiga Wineworks. This turned out to be a very interesting winery. The winemaker, Rich Rorden, was pouring so we had a chance to get to know him and his wines. Turns out that Rich believes that malo-lactic fermentation is a process to be avoided whenever humanly possible. He picks his grapes when they're fairly ripe, ferments, puts them in a combination of tanks and varying ages of barrels, and then bottle-ages his wines for at least three or four years before release. The newest of the releases were from 2006, with most of them going back to '02 and '03 (including his chardonnays).
Last night, we opened a bottle of their 2003 Monterey Shiraz. (This was $25 from the winery.) Rich makes both "Shiraz" and "Syrah", believing that the clones differ enough to make this worthwhile. (A side-by-side tasting indicated that he's right, at least with the grapes he gets.) The Shiraz clocked in at 13.9% alcohol and had a vibrant purple color. The nose is indeed closer to an Aussie shiraz than a Rhone syrah. There's mostly plummy fruit and black pepper with no hint of bacon, earth, or horsepoop. Flavor-wise, there's more of that peppery-plummy fruit, but it's backed with a pretty hefty hit of acidity. The texture remains somewhat thick in the mid-palate with some light tannins coming up in the finish. Definitely a food wine rather than a cocktail wine.
Overall, I think Rich is onto something. The gospel of no-malo comes across as something of a schtick, but the wines are good and they appear to be a reliable alternative to what's out there in the mainstream.
