Sonoma Wines: Pangloss Cellars 2014 Sonoma County Syrah

We moved to Sonoma with one goal in mind: to become the ultimate wine hipsters. Well, two goals: to become the ultimate wine hipsters AND drink a ton of wine from the best wineries in Sonoma. And eat a lot of good food. Fine, we have a lot of goals. Enough about our goals. We’re scouring Sonoma County for the best little known, small run wineries we can find in order to achieve the greatest virtue of hipsterdom: telling you all about the really cool places we love that you've never heard of. We’re doing this for you. Trust us.

Sometimes you stumble across a real gem when you least expect it. On a recent afternoon we found ourselves with a couple of hours to burn. We feverishly searched for a winery or tasting room we hadn’t visited. That’s how we ended up going to Pangloss Cellars. We’d walked past them before and not really thought much of it. For whatever reason, we had pretty low expectations. Our gut said it was going to be overpriced and mediocre. We were wrong. So very, very wrong.

In our first look at Pangloss Cellars wines we're going to review their 2014 Sonoma County Syrah:

It's a really interesting and unique expression of Syrah. As expected, it's a deep and brooding purple. It has smoke, bacon and blueberry on the nose. Yep. BACON. The aroma was described to us as a blueberry pie baked in bacon grease. That’s the perfect way to put it. On the tongue, it has blueberries, cherries, black pepper and a touch of maple syrup. There’s a bit of oak and a decent punch of pepper on the finish. This is exactly what you expect from a good Syrah, with a bacony twist. It's on the short list of the best Syrah's we've had in Sonoma.

This is by no means an inexpensive bottle of wine. At $40, it's enough to make us pause. And after we paused, we joined the Pangloss Cellars wine club and bought a case of their wine, including two bottles of the Syrah. We can offer no higher endorsement than voting with our dollars.

The Pangloss Cellars tasting room is right in the middle of downtown Sonoma. Their website is on the internet. Oh, what's the URL? It's https://www.panglosscellars.com/.