Had an unexpected opportunity to blind taste a wine today- Guessed it was a recent year washington cabernet- didn’t quite taste like cab, but the impressive about of coffee and other oak notes and a bit of a sawdust finish left that as the best guess.
The wine? 2010 Gramercy Estate Syrah! I had to admit being in utter disbelief! This is one of the red stripe label, club only wines.
Tell me this is an aberration for this particular vintage! This can’t be a purposeful style!?? Can it?!!??
That sucks man- you think it’s possible they overdo the new oak treatment on the wine club wines? I had a really similar tasting experience on the Delmas Syrah. Way too much new oak- obscured all other parts of the wine.
Sorry you were disappointed, but as a friend of mine pointed out recently, the demonization of oak is really an interesting phenomenon. Wouldn’t surprise me if this was a nice wine in time.
This isn’t about demonizing new oak. Please. It may very well be a nice wine now, but not my style and not the style of wine I have been accustomed to at Gramercy. If this was labelled 21 Grams, I wouldn’t have an issue. I just don’t like very much on my syrah. If it stands out, it’s too much. For a 2010 wine, this should be more resolved by now in any case. My guess is that this is an aberration- 2010 was a lighter vintage IIRC and may not carry oak as well as expected. But this is also a chance to try to help influence against any potential stylistic change over there. (Hi, Greg)
Scott - Sorry you were disappointed with the bottle. If you shoot me an email on my website with your address, I will send you something else that I think you will like.
Regarding the taste of oak, maybe I have a clue as to what happened. We didn’t put any new oak on that wine. That wine was aged in 3 - 7 year old neutral barrel. However, many times whole cluster when a wine is young can impersonate oak. It sometimes comes across as cinnamon or even American oak type dill. I have seen some of our wines do this for short periods of time, literally tasting like American oak. Luckily, with a little age, it integrates. I have also seen this cinnamon/american oak hint in the Rhone with those that use a lot of stems.
I have noticed that the 2010 vintage Syrahs are shutting down (ours and others in WA), which would mask the fruit of the wine, enhancing stem character. In terms of winemaking and oak, for example, in 2014, we didn’t buy a single new oak barrel for Syrah. We are also starting to experiment with aging Syrah in concrete. the only Syrah we make that gets a bit of new oak is the John Lewis, but only from new puncheon and always a very small percentage.
Also - just as an FYI for discussion, if you have 4 barrels of Syrah with one new barrel, its obviously 25% new oak. If you change that to one new puncheon (basically a double barrel plus a bit) and 2 barrels, you would think the new oak percentage doubles to 50%. But it ends up somewhere like 35-40% new oak because the surface area of the barrel doesn’t double.
Hi Greg- Thanks for replying- This wasn’t my bottle so I would feel criminal taking accepting anything from you. It is really odd that this would taste so oak driven, but others that tasted agreed with my perception. Perhaps it was the stems as you suggest, I really don’t know, but take you for your word about the actual oak content. I am glad you saw this though- one thought was if this was some experiment, to offer some dissuasion from continuing down that path. 
FWIW, we had a 2009 Gramercy Syrah the other night with friends- really great wine and the best red of the night with no slouches in the bunch.