Plumbago Never Wrote Lead
TASTING NOTES:
2023 Andrew Murray Vineyards Estate Grown Syrah, Santa Ynez Valley - ““The 2023 Syrah Estate Grown is bright, vibrant and structured, with ample depth and sneakily firm structure. Iodine, graphite, toasted spices and dark plum fruit open slowly. It’s a young wine that will need time to integrate its oak, at which point the overall harmony should kick up a touch. That said, the balance today is quite nice, and there’s ample freshness to carry it. Time is on your side.”” (AbV 14.4%, pH 3.69, TA 6.3 g/L TA)
100% Syrah
2023 Andrew Murray Vineyards Syrah, Nolan Vineyard, Alisos Canyon - ““The 2023 Syrah Nolan Vineyard is shaping up to be a gem of a wine. Deep, somber minerality underscores the wine’s natural fruit weight. The inner juxtaposition of brightness and darkness (acid vs. fruit) is so enticing. Effusive aromatics of black cherry, chalk, white pepper, and lavender meet with an ultra-fine tannin structure and such elegant freshness.”” (AbV 14.9%, pH 3.71, TA 5.9 g/L)
100% Syrah
2023 Andrew Murray Vineyards Syrah, Watch Hill Vineyard, Alisos Canyon - “Deep ruby/purple-hued, the 2023 Syrah Watch Hill Vineyard offers a pure, lively nose of black and blue fruits, black pepper, violets, and bouquet garni that gives this a Cornas-like vibe. Medium-bodied and concentrated, it has fresh acids, ripe tannins, and outstanding length, showing the cooler, fresh, focused, nicely structured style of the vintage. This blend of 95% Syrah and 5% Viognier was fermented with 15% whole cluster and aged 18 months in 15% new French oak. It will benefit from a year or three of bottle age and should keep for 15 years in cold cellars. Drink 2026-2040” (AbV 14%, pH 3.65, TA 6.1 g/L)
95% Syrah, 5% Viognier
BARRELS: French Oak barrels.
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Graphite, as in the “iodine, graphite, toasted spices and dark plum fruit” in the tasting note for the Estate Grown Syrah.
There has never been any lead in a pencil, and the confusion goes back to a mining town in northwest England. Sometime in the 1500s, a storm in Borrowdale in Cumbria reportedly uprooted a tree and exposed a deposit of a soft, black, slippery mineral. Shepherds used it to mark their sheep. Then someone figured out it made excellent liners for cannonball molds, and a local curiosity became a strategic asset.
The English crown took it very seriously. The mine was guarded, workers were searched on the way out, and Parliament eventually made stealing the stuff a felony (it had its own black market, which I find hilarious for something we now give to second graders). Since it looked like lead and left marks like lead, everyone called it “black lead,” or plumbago. The name graphite didn’t show up until 1789, when a German mineralogist coined it from the Greek graphein, “to write.” So the word “lead” in “lead pencil” is a leftover from a case of mistaken identity that nobody ever fixed. I now want to smell a wine that smells like the thing you chewed on during a math test.
