2022 QUPE SYRAH CENTRAL COAST

The 2022 vintage was a classic and nearly perfect vintage for the Central Coast Syrah. Warm days and cold nights helped to naturally limit yields while allowing our various Syrah sites to develop the full array of cool-climate Syrah notes: bright cherry, blackberry, white pepper, purple flowers, licorice, tar, and smoky meats. Though rich and concentrated, the palate is smooth and the finish is as long and fresh as the summer evenings that inspire this wine.

VINEYARD
Qupé has been crafting cool-climate Syrah from the Central Coast for over 40 years. We know where the best fruit comes from and we leverage our long-term relationships to have our vineyard partners farm specific sites to our very strict requirements – low yield, clean, unblemished fruit, all certified sustainable. We want this wine to speak of its cool-climate origins, while showcasing the diversity of the Central Coast. 50% of the wine comes from 30+ year old vines growing in the sandy, limestone-rich slopes of Arroyo Grande where we achieve incredibly rich and dark color, with spicy red fruit notes and vibrant natural acidity. The remaining 50% is grown in the sandy, gravelly soils of the Santa Ynez Valley, where we find slightly warmer days and even colder nights that reveal blackberry, blueberry and peppery notes. The final blend yields a quintessential Central Coast Syrah.

WINEMAKING
As with all our Syrah bottlings, this wine was crafted with traditional methods in our modern, state of the art winery: hand harvesting at night to benefit from our cold evenings, small picks at a broad spectrum of ripeness to ensure maximum complexity, and flavor development. We employ a mix of quite small open-top tanks and medium sized closed tanks for a short cold-soak before a rather quick fermentation that allows us to achieve incredible color and medium weight, balanced tannins and a long smooth finish. After fermentation, the must is gently pressed to stainless tanks to settle overnight before being racked to French Oak barrels for 18 months of aging on very fine lees. As bottling approaches, the wine is clean racked under nitrogen to tank for final blending and resting before bottling using our own bottling equipment.

“Tart red fruit and mineral undertones make for an attractively old-school-influenced
interpretation of Syrah. This is pretty impressive for the price and scale of
production...” 90 Points Billy Norris for Vinous - August 2025