Rust on the Label

The label is a sepia photograph of an industrial plant — tanks, gantries, pipework, a chimney — with a title hand-lettered across the top in a font that looks borrowed from a chemistry notebook: Atlantis Fe₂O₃-2a. Fe₂O₃ is iron oxide. Rust. Whatever Manfred Krankl meant by pairing a lost city with the formula for corrosion, he did not explain it, and Sine Qua Non labels are not meant to be explained.

2005 was unusual even for this house. Instead of one Syrah and one Grenache, the vintage was released as six bottlings under the single Atlantis name: three Syrah lots, lettered 1a, 1b and 1c, and three Grenache lots, 2a, 2b and 2c, each a separately raised parcel of the same harvest. The 2a is Grenache almost entirely — a little over nine-tenths, with the balance Syrah — and nearly all of it came from Eleven Confessions, the estate’s own vineyard in the Sta. Rita Hills, which had come into full production only a couple of years earlier. About half the fruit was fermented as whole clusters.

Grenache, the SQN Way

Grenache at Sine Qua Non has never meant the pale, peppery wine of the southern Rhône. It is picked late, raised long, and built to the same scale as the Syrah. Early notes on the 2a described a distinctive chocolate note over blackberry, cassis, kirsch, liquorice and camphor, with florals lifting it, then a full-bodied palate with a roasted-meat savour — and, despite all that size, an overall impression of elegance and definition that surprised the people writing about it. Ten to fifteen years was the window suggested for it.

In the Glass

It came third in an evening at home, after a 1990 Paillard and alongside a magnum of Giacosa’s 2000 Riserva, with a young Clos de l’Arlot still to come.

At sixteen years the colour had held — a deep ruby-purple with only a little bricking at the rim, dark for Grenache. The nose was warm and layered: kirsch and dried strawberry, cocoa, garrigue, a smoky, meaty note, dried lavender and a whisper of that camphor. On the palate it was full and silky, the alcohol carried by the density of fruit rather than sticking out, the tannins soft and completely integrated, and the finish long, sweet-savoury and faintly mineral. The whole clusters showed as a spice and lift that kept it from being merely rich.

Elsewhere in this archive the Krankl cellar appears in its Syrah form — the 2008 B 20 — and in its estate wine, Next of Kyn No. 2, both from the same evening two weeks earlier, as well as a 2015 white. The Grenache is the most openly hedonistic of the four. Rust, it turns out, ages well.