Send Urvashi.
TASTING NOTES: “Deep, inky purple in the glass, this Syrah opens with generous aromatics of black pepper, fig, and ripe plum layered over dark berry fruit. Notes of vanilla and toasted coconut frame the nose, while hints of sage add lift and complexity.” (AbV 14.9%, pH 3.7)
VARIETALS: 100% Syrah
BARRELS: 8 Months in 30% New French oak and 70% once-used French oak
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Apsara — the Sanskrit word for an angelic celestial dancer that gives this winery its name —
There’s a whole category of mythological being I’d describe as “professionally beautiful and kind of terrifying about it.” The apsaras of Hindu and Buddhist tradition fall squarely in this category. They’re supernatural dancers of extraordinary grace, attendants of the heavens, and they show up constantly in classical South and Southeast Asian art — carved into the walls of Angkor Wat in such numbers (there are roughly 1,800 of them depicted there) that archaeologists developed a whole classification system just to catalog their different poses and headdresses. Which is a sentence I love. Somewhere, an archaeologist has a spreadsheet of celestial dancer hand positions.
The interesting wrinkle is that apsaras weren’t purely decorative. In the Mahabharata and Ramayana they get deployed as cosmic distractions — sent by the god Indra to break the concentration of ascetics who were getting too powerful through meditation. The logic being: if a sage meditates long enough without interruption, he accrues enough spiritual merit to threaten the gods themselves, so you send in a celestial dancer and hope for the best. It’s essentially divine counterintelligence. “Sir, this monk has been sitting still for forty years.” “Send Urvashi.”
