09/05/2026
What happens when you take the labels away?
Last Friday we sat down with four Syrahs:
2022 Jamet Côte-Rôtie
2023 BIG HEAD RAW Syrah
2023 Lipinski Syrah
2023 Lipinski Syrah Reserve
We tasted them blind.
There wasn’t a unanimous favourite. Preferences moved between the RAW and the two Lipinski w**es, which is exactly what makes blind tasting interesting.
There was, however, one consistent result: none of us placed the Jamet ahead of the three Niagara w**es. More surprisingly, nobody identified it as Jamet.
That doesn’t make one w**e objectively better than another.
Jamet is a benchmark for Syrah, and a 2022 is extraordinarily young. Every w**e in the lineup is at a different point in its evolution. We weren’t trying to decide which bottle we’d rather drink tonight. We were looking at structure, concentration, intensity and balance.
What made us want to share this is that we’ve been here before.
In 2018, around the SOMM 2 premiere at TIFF with Jason Wise, we tasted our 2017 RAW Syrah blind against Jamet. RAW was preferred then as well.
Eight years later, we became curious enough to try it again.
Blind tasting has limitations. But it does one thing particularly well:
It makes the w**e speak before the label does.
And sometimes that’s worth listening to.
