Pour a glass of Syrah and you are listening to three conversations at once. Most of us hear them as a single sound — this tastes good, or this tastes like a lot of things — and leave it there. But the things a wine tastes like arrive from three different places, at three different times. Once you can tell them apart, a glass stops being a wall of flavor and becomes something you can read.

 

The three places are the grape, the cellar, and time. Winemakers call them primary, secondary, and tertiary. You do not need the words. You need only to know that everything you smell came from somewhere — and that where it came from is half the pleasure.

 

Primary: the grape itself

Primary flavors are the fruit and the flowers, what the grape carried in from the vineyard. In Syrah this runs dark — blackberry, plum, black cherry — and then the one marker that gives Syrah away every time: black pepper. That pepper is not a figure of speech. It is a real compound in the grape, and Syrah carries more of it than almost any wine made. Find the pepper and you have heard the grape speak in its own voice. Primary flavors are loudest when a wine is young, and in a warm place like Temecula they come ripe and full, the fruit pushed forward by the sun.

 

Secondary: the hand of the cellar

Secondary flavors are not in the grape at all. They are what happens after the harvest, in the winery. Oak barrels give a Syrah its vanilla, its mocha, its sweet woodsmoke and toast; the way the wine is handled can bring savoury notes of cured meat and bacon fat. These are choices, not accidents. When you taste smoke curling under the fruit of a Syrah, you are tasting a decision someone made — how long in barrel, which wood, how much char. The grape set the table. The cellar seasoned the dish.

 

Tertiary: what time does

Tertiary flavors are the slowest to arrive. They come from years in the bottle, as the bright fruit softens and folds inward and something quieter rises in its place — leather, dried violet, forest floor, olive, game. A young Syrah is all pepper and blackberry. The same wine at ten years is browner, calmer, more savoury, more complex. Most of the wine we drink, we drink young, so tertiary notes are the rarest of the three to meet — which is exactly why an older bottle can stop a room. You are tasting time, made legible.

 

Why Syrah

Syrah is the best teacher for this because it speaks in all three registers more plainly than almost any grape. The pepper is unmistakably the grape. The smoke is unmistakably the cellar. And given a few years, the leather and olive are unmistakably time. Pour the Temecula Syrah this week and try, just once, to sort what you smell into its three sources: this came from the grape, this from the barrel, this — if it is there at all — from the years. You will not place it all correctly. That is not the point. The point is that the wall comes down, and the glass begins to answer back.

 

Pour something tonight and name one flavor from each: grape, cellar, time. Tell us what you found. [LINK]

 

Read Next in This Week's Wine Path

• Region guide — Temecula Valley (Sunday) the gap that made the wine possible. 
• Skill — the three conversations (this post) grape, cellar, time.
• Varietal guide — Syrah (Tuesday) the pepper up close, and where it comes from.