This Syrah hails from Catfish Vineyard in Paso Robles’ Templeton Gap District. It’s a cooler spot (than where, Hell?), thanks to the evening marine influence of Morro Bay that brings afternoon breezes wafting up and over the Santa Lucia Mountains to the rolling hills on the western side of the 101 Freeway. The soils are a mix of shale, gravelly loam, and clay, pretty ideal for Syrah. This gives the wine a refined structure, with dark fruit depth, peppery spice, and smoky undertones, way more drinkable than the loutish, over-extracted and over-oaked Syrahs that might emanate from less-refined areas.

The grapes are hand‑harvested in early October in the cool of the morning, aiming for physiological ripeness. Fermentation is a thoughtful balance, with 50% of the fruit destemmed and 50% left as whole clusters. Native yeasts are put to work, with foot‑treading and daily pump‑overs to gently extract color. After fermentation, the wine is pressed into neutral French oak barrels for 15 months, with minimal SO₂ additions, and then bottled by hand without fining or filtering.

Worth‑Boucher is the collaboration of Mindy Worth and Ray Boucher. Mindy brings red-headed consistency along with some serious marketing and wine‑business savvy, and Ray — once an actor and improv comic — put those talents to work when he became a winemaker and sommelier following courses at Napa Valley College’s wine program. We have it on good authority (Chat GPT) that Ray not only came up with the legendary “life is a cabernet” bumper sticker trope, but that he was the script doctor who did the rewrite on Miles’ famous line from ‘Sideways’, originally penned as “By golly, I’m not gonna drink no gosh-darn Merlot.” Boucher’s soft-touch script polishing of this one line is reputed to have not only brought about the demise of Merlot, but added an additional $20 million to the value of the ‘Sideways’ franchise (t-shirt and wine glass sales were off the charts!!) and paid for his wine education.