The Vineyard Behind the House

Sine Qua Non changes everything every year — the name, the label, the blend. Next of Kyn is the opposite proposition from the same hands. Manfred and Elaine Krankl launched it with the 2007 vintage as a separate operation, sourced entirely from Cumulus Vineyard, the property in Oak View on the road to Ojai where they live and where the winery stands. The label is the same every year: a small, scratchy drawing of two figures, one in a pale hooded coat and one in black, on a parchment ground. The only thing that changes is the number on the wax-white seal at the shoulder. This one says No. 2.

The name is a pun with a straight face. The Krankls called it Next of Kyn because it is the closest relative to Sine Qua Non — same people, same cellar, same appetite for long élevage — but with the one thing SQN’s scattered sourcing never had: a single piece of ground.

Cumulus

The first vines at Cumulus went in during 2004 — Syrah, Grenache and Roussanne — with more Grenache the following year and, in 2008, small blocks of Petite Sirah, Mourvèdre, Touriga Nacional and Petit Manseng. The site is inland from the coast and warmer than the Sta. Rita Hills vineyards SQN leans on, and the wines from it tend to carry more flesh.

No. 2 is the 2008 harvest: roughly four-fifths Syrah with Grenache and a little Roussanne, aged for close to thirty-two months in French oak before bottling. That is the Krankl signature — barrels for longer than almost anyone else in California would dare — and the point is that the wine is released when the oak has already begun to disappear rather than when it is still shouting.

In the Glass

Poured after the Bernstein Charmes-Chambertin, as the first of the evening’s two Krankl reds.

Thirteen years from the harvest, the colour was still nearly opaque, a deep purple-black with a narrow garnet rim. The nose was the full Central Coast register: blackberry and blueberry liqueur, liquorice, espresso, smoked meat, a sweet vanilla-and-cedar thread from all that wood, and a floral lift — violet, lavender — that kept it from being merely dense. The palate was plush and enveloping, sweet-fruited but not sugary, with tannins that had gone completely round and an acidity quietly doing more work than the first impression suggested. Long, rich, silky, with the smoke and coffee lasting longest.

It sat beside Sine Qua Non’s B 20, from the same cellar and the same year, and the two made an unusually clean comparison: the estate wine fleshier and more openly generous, the SQN cooler and more inward. Elsewhere in this archive the Krankl house appears with a 2015 white and a 2005 Grenache — the same cellar, no two wines alike.