Rare Syrah made from ungrafted vines by a master of the grape

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2021 Beckmen Vineyards Syrah Own Purisima Mountain Vineyard Ballard Canyon 750 ml

Limited Time Offer
Ships 08/19

Retail: $68

$40 41% off 1-7 bottles
$35 49% off 8+ bottles

Shipping included on orders $150+.
  • Curated by unrivaled experts
  • Choose your delivery date
  • Temperature controlled shipping options
  • Get credited back if a wine fails to impress

Beckmen’s Biggest Bet

Steve Beckmen was one of the first people we ever heard use the word “biodynamic.” That method of farming has been an obsession of his for decades, and he long ago recognized that great wineries in Alsace, Bordeaux, and Burgundy all credited biodynamic practices with transforming their estates. So he sought to do the same. 

“I was excited about never spraying a drop of chemical herbicide or pesticide on one of my Syrah vines,” Steve told us about his move to biodynamics.

He also adopted dry-farming protocols from the Old World—especially France. There, irrigation is illegal, and the truly great wines are drawn off vineyards with extremely deep roots, which result from searching out water down below. In drought years, these roots allow the plants to shrug off the impact of hydric stress. 

Drought years are common in California, which is why so many vineyards in the state irrigate—and why Beckmen’s dry-farmed, limestone-strewn Purisima Mountain Vineyard is a most conspicuous outlier. 

Those deep roots have served Beckmen well. They’ve continued to flourish through California’s many droughts, and even in the driest years, they wick up water from far underground. The work they’re forced to do on the dramatic slopes of the Purisima Mountain Vineyard—which reaches up to 1,150 feet and features nearly 500 feet of elevation change—results in supremely concentrated berries. 

His Own Syrah takes it a step further, channeling the terroir of Purisima even more directly, though it took Steve and his brother Jeff a full 15 years of experimentation to be able to pull this off. Ungrafted vines have their own roots, not a grafted rootstock, so they’re constantly at risk of devastation at the hands of the soil louse, phylloxera. But they provide a depth, energy, and soul that’s unique. It’s one of California’s great Syrahs.