Lumpy Legume Standard
TASTING NOTES: “Boysenberry, blueberry, and fresh baking spices dominate the nose, accompanied by fresh-cut violets. The palate explodes with black cherry, coffee, and carob nibs. Notable acid and tannins yield an herbal and well-balanced finish. The Homestead Hill Vineyard has three different clones of Syrah (Durell, Estrella, and clone 174) and two different clones of Cabernet (clone 4 and 43) planted. The New Routine blend, however; only consists of one of the Syrah clones, but both Cabernet. Each clone (or block) gets picked at different times as ripeness varies.” (AbV 14.9%, pH 3.51)
VARIETALS: 79% Syrah, 21% Cabernet Sauvignon
BARRELS: The wine was aged for a total of 36 months before being bottled in April 2024, unfined and unfiltered.
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Carob nibs, as in the “black cherry, coffee, and carob nibs” the tasting note promises on the palate.
Carob is the reason a diamond is measured in carats. The Greek word for the carob seed was keration, “little horn,” after the curved shape of the pod, and it traveled through Arabic (qirat) and Italian before landing in English as carat. The tidy story is that ancient merchants balanced gold and gems against carob seeds because the seeds were supposedly all the same weight. I love that story and I’m told the seeds are not actually that consistent, which means a lot of history’s most expensive transactions may have been settled against a slightly lumpy legume.
It gets better. Since 1907 the metric carat has been fixed at exactly 200 milligrams, so the carob seed has been replaced by a number, and the number has outlived the plant’s usefulness by a century. Meanwhile gold uses the same word for something else entirely: 24-karat gold is pure, and 18-karat is 18 parts gold out of 24. (Americans spell that one with a K, which I’m choosing to believe is the language apologizing for the confusion.) So the next time someone shows you a ring, remember that both numbers on its spec sheet trace back to a tree whose pods get ground up and sold as a chocolate substitute.
