The Quiet Krankl

Every Sine Qua Non red is a one-off. Manfred Krankl gives each vintage’s Syrah and Grenache a new name and a new label of his own making, and never repeats either. The 2008 Syrah was called B 20, two characters and no explanation, under a portrait of a young woman with red hair and her eyes closed, printed in the washed-out tones of an old photograph. The house does not annotate its titles, and this one has stayed unexplained.

The wine behind the label is a blend in the Sine Qua Non manner: overwhelmingly Syrah with a little Grenache and a pinch of Viognier, drawn from four sites. Just over half came from Eleven Confessions, the estate’s own vineyard in the Sta. Rita Hills; the rest from Cumulus, the Krankls’ home vineyard in Oak View, and from Bien Nacido and White Hawk further north in Santa Barbara County. Part of the Grenache went in as whole clusters. It spent twenty-six months in French oak, three-fifths of it new — long by any standard except this cellar’s.

Cool for the House

2008 was a cooler year for these vineyards than the vintages either side of it, and the B 20 has always been read that way: a wine of chiselled, delineated fruit and mineral precision rather than the sheer mass that the Sine Qua Non name usually implies. Early notes on it talked about blackberry and cassis under smoked meat, underbrush and chocolate, but also about a floral lift and a texture that was almost light for the house — one critic’s phrase for it was one of the more understated wines Krankl had made. The wine needed time for the oak to finish integrating, and it had been given thirteen years.

In the Glass

It followed Next of Kyn No. 2, the same cellar’s estate wine from the same harvest, and the pairing did what no tasting note can: it put the two Krankl temperaments side by side. The Next of Kyn was warm, plush and open. The B 20 was the cool one.

Deep purple still, with a slight bricking at the edge. The nose took time — first tar, graphite and crushed rock, then blueberry and blackberry in their dried form, then violets, cured meat and a whiff of camphor. On the palate it was medium-to-full rather than massive, with a tension running through it that thirteen years had not relaxed: the tannins fine and slightly dusty, the acidity bright, the fruit dark and savoury rather than sweet. The finish was long and went to liquorice and stone. The oak was simply gone.

Sine Qua Non is often described as a maximalist house. This bottle was the argument that the description is incomplete. Elsewhere in this archive the same cellar’s 2005 Grenache and 2015 white show other faces of it, and the evening closed with the sweetest of them all, Mr. K’s Straw Man.