Three Syrahs from 2021: Dream Vintage, Fire Vintage – and the Twist in the Glass

There's a vintage printed on the label, and we like to pretend it tells us something. "2021 – wasn't that a good year?" The honest answer is: for whom? Because the same number can mean entirely different things depending on latitude. In May 2026 I lined up three Syrahs from the same vintage – one from South Australia, one from the Messinian coast of the Peloponnese, one from the foothills of the White Mountains in Crete. Three bottles, one number, three utterly different growing seasons. And if vintage logic is worth anything at all, the result should have been predictable: the wine from the cool year would be the lean, refined one, the two from the hot year would be the big, jammy ones. That is precisely what the evening set out to test. That is precisely what it disproved.

One vintage, told three ways

Let's start with the weather, because that's where the real drama of this tasting lies.

South Australia 2021 is what the local wine world calls a dream vintage – and with a fervour you rarely see in print. La Niña brought cool air to South Australia but – unlike on the rain-soaked east coast – no rain: growing-season rainfall in the Barossa Valley came in at 129 millimetres, a good 40 per cent below the average (Eden Valley 20 per cent below). December saw its lowest maximum temperature since 2014, February ran more than a degree below the long-term mean, and Michael Twelftree of Two Hands counted just one day above 40 °C all summer in his harvest report. Picking continued at a leisurely pace right into April. The Halliday Wine Companion captured the region's mood in phrases such as "Barossa's greatest year in living memory" and "a true unicorn vintage", and Brian Croser, on JancisRobinson.com, spoke of one of the finest harvests of his fifty-plus vintages. To be fair, taken as an overall average, the season was not quite as cool everywhere as the marketing would have it – across the whole year South Australia actually came in slightly above its long-term average temperature; what mattered was the perfectly mild February ripening window. And the Wine Spectator was rather more measured than the Australian euphoria, awarding just 91 points to 2021 Barossa/McLaren Vale Shiraz, below even its scores for 2019 and 2020. But the basic pattern stands: slow, even ripening, high natural acidity, no extreme heat. A vintage for elegance, if ever there was one.

Greece 2021 is the exact opposite. At the end of July the "Lucifer" high-pressure system pushed Saharan air across the country; the heatwave that began on 28 July lasted ten days, making it the longest since records began around 1900 – the National Observatory of Athens ranks it first on eleven of sixteen metrics among all heatwaves since 1900, more extreme even than the notorious 1987 heatwave, although Greece's all-time temperature record of 48.0 °C, set in 1977, still stands. Then there were the fires: around 125,000 hectares burned nationwide, the most since 2007, including some 50,000 hectares on northern Euboea alone – the largest fire in modern Greek history – and around 5,100 hectares in Messenia. Yiannis Karakasis dubbed 2021 "the year of the oenologist"; George Skouras reported small, thin-skinned berries with plenty of colour and concentration but soft acidity and high pH, and the oenologist Nikos Varvarigos saw uneven ripening even within a single bunch. A vintage that has been dogged by questions of balance and ageability ever since.

And because the picture would otherwise be too tidy: France 2021 was yet another world in that same year – April frost, persistent rain, downy mildew, a cool, wet nail-biter with classic acidity and tiny yields. The same vintage on the label – and in Adelaide, Kalamata and Beaune it tells three stories that don't even know each other.

A quick aside is in order here, because "cool" is a slippery word. Cool *for Barossa* is not the same as cool in absolute terms – and anyone who puts the three origins on a single absolute scale is in for a surprise: it is the Australian home of St Henri, of all places, that turns out to be the coolest of the three. The long-term climate normals put the mean for the warmest Barossa month, January, at around 21 °C – daily maxima averaging 29, nights just under 14 degrees (Nuriootpa station, 1952–1999). The Messenian coast around Kalamata reaches a good 27 degrees in its hottest month, July, the coast near Chania around 26 – five to six degrees above Australia's midsummer mean in each case. And the gap opens up not by day but at night: continental Barossa drops to just under 14 degrees after sunset, while the coastal Greek sites barely dip below 20 – averaged over the whole ripening season, the Mediterranean vines experience more warmth in absolute terms, not less. As for sunshine, there is little to separate the three anyway: all sit in a similar band of roughly 2,700 to 2,900 hours a year; the data aren't even robust enough to support a proper ranking.

2021 then pushed the two worlds to opposite extremes. While the Barossa, under La Niña, enjoyed a decidedly mild summer – January maxima mostly below 30 °C, a harvest that stretched into April, a vintage the growers' association itself filed under "exceptional" – the two Greeks were caught in the thick of that same record heatwave. And it hit them head-on: in Messenia, the Lacules' home region, the thermometer climbed inland to 46.1 °C (Arfara, 3 August) – Koroni's coastline stayed cooler, thanks to the sea breeze; on Crete, the Nostos came out of a year marked by heat and drought, with temperatures near 40 °C, no rain to speak of and unirrigated vines. The "cool" wine of the evening thus saw the least heat not only in relative but also in absolute terms – and scarcely less sunshine than the two from that scorching vintage.

So the expectations going into my flight were crystal clear: Australia would bring the finesse, Greece the muscle. Let's dive in.

The Australian: Penfolds St Henri 2021 – power from the cool year

St Henri is Penfolds' grand counterpoint to Grange – a Shiraz from the Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale that spends twelve months exclusively in large, seasoned old oak vats, with not a splinter of new oak, none of that vanilla veneer. The name dates from the 1950s, its roots reach back to an 1888 claret, and at around a hundred euros it is the affordable classic next to a flagship that costs several times as much. (Whether the 2021 is really a straight Shiraz, incidentally, couldn't be conclusively pinned down – sources differ, citing either 100 per cent or 97 per cent with a splash of Cabernet Sauvignon; I deliberately leave the question open.) Critics have been unanimous in their praise of the vintage: Dave Brookes gave it 97 points in the Halliday Wine Companion, Erin Larkin of The Wine Advocate likewise gave it 97 – and, after a vertical tasting stretching back to 1958, ranked the 2021 among the top five St Henris ever made, behind only 1962 and 2010 – while James Suckling scored it 96. Penfolds gives it a drinking window through 2045.

In the glass came the first head-scratcher of the evening – though at first a banal one: the wine was served a touch too warm, and initially the nose barely rose above a plain red-wine aroma. At the right temperature, though, dark berries and plum emerge, liquorice and dark chocolate over that graphite-and-iron minerality that, with this wine, people like to call ironstone. And on the palate the real one – the thematic head-scratcher: no doubt about who the heavyweight here is. Masses of blueberry, berry-driven through and through, dense and almost opaque – the jammiest of the three. The wine from the cool unicorn year, from the season of the "best acidities in many years", is the fruit colossus of the flight. The lovely thing about it is the tannin, which works in several layers: decidedly grippy and somewhat coarser on top, but beneath that a very fine grain that fills every gap. Where the Cretan alongside comes across as finer and more herbal, and the Peloponnesian more elegant, this one moves in all directions at once – round but never tame, with a long, mouth-watering finish.

For me, that's a 97. Shiraz doesn't get much better than this, and on top of that the value for money is outstanding. The only catch: this wine has astonishingly little to do with the vintage story that accompanied it into the glass.

The Peloponnesian: Lacules Syrah 2021 – elegance, twenty-six paces from the sea

Lacules is a winemaker's dream with an Austrian imprint. The project began with Friedrich Gruber, an Austrian cellar-construction specialist who once received the coastal plot in Koroni as payment for building a cellar; today it is run by his daughter Barbara Gruber and her husband – very deliberately without an outside oenologist. The Syrah – a single-varietal planting – grows to within twenty-six paces of the sea, and half of it is aged in new French oak. You could take this wine for a passion project until you open Weinwisser: René Gabriel has been showering the Lacules Syrahs with top scores for years – 19/20 for the 2016, 18/20 apiece for the 2017 and 2018, another 18/20 for the 2020 – and he raises the 2021 to 19/20, the very top of his scale. For around sixty euros, this is a very serious wine.

As for the vintage: Koroni lies in Messenia, one of the regions where wildfires actually raged in 2021, and the August heat struck the Peloponnese with full force – without the cooling wind that usually makes the nights bearable. Karakasis's sceptical "oenologist's year" diagnosis, however, stems from inland Nemea and its Agiorgitiko; Koroni sits right by the sea, and the breeze noticeably tempers the heat. The picking dates show just how much the vintage varied even within this single estate: as early as 11 August – barely a week after the record heatwave had subsided – Lacules brought in the grapes from the seaside parcel; the vineyard near Koroni followed on 27 August, Nea Koroni not until 12 September. A full month between the first parcel and the last. I have, moreover, had this very 2021 in the glass before – in August 2024, at three years old – and gave it 96 points at the time – kumquats, very compact.

This time, in the flight, it showed as a different wine altogether. At the moment it is very closed, a touch too young. On the nose and palate there's a distinctly malty note that some at the table picked up and others didn't; the alcohol leads on the attack, so that you only notice the tannin after the sip has gone down, as it lingers on the tongue. Over the course of the evening it opens up, becomes fruitier, the vanilla from the 50 per cent new oak comes through, which hadn't been there before. And yet – or perhaps for that very reason – one thing was beyond dispute: of the three, it is the most elegant. Pure elegance even, which I find remarkable for wines in this category. It isn't dense and jammy like the St Henri – nor does it try to be; at heart a round wine that plays with tannin and flavour. The wine from the bushfire vintage is the aesthete of the trio – read that sentence twice.

The reason I stay so calm despite how closed the wine is right now comes down to this estate's track record in my cellar. In 2023 I had rated the 2018 at 98+ – and then subjected it to a month-long "terrace test": spring temperatures, blazing sun, a thick-walled, opaque bottle. After a full month the wine was not merely drinkable but a genuine pleasure. An almost indestructible Greek wine, unlike any I had encountered before. In the same 2023 tasting (in German), the international benchmark was the Boekenhoutskloof Syrah 2018 from the Swartland – awarded 97 points by both Decanter and Tim Atkin, on paper the very pinnacle of world wine. I found it refined, intense, almost perfumed, with a long finish – and fairly rewarded with 93 points, behind the best Greek Syrahs of the tasting. The no-name Greek finishing ahead of the world star, in the same flight. Once you've experienced that, you lose both your awe of labels and your nervousness about closed young wines.

For the 2021, that means: 94+, with an emphatic plus. It likely showed fresher in 2024 than it does today, but it has plenty in reserve. Best advice: lay it down for another five years – I'd put the drinking window at 2031 to 2056.

The Cretan: Manousakis Nostos Syrah 2021 – the polariser

Few wines divide opinion quite like the Nostos Syrah. Yiannis Karakasis once named the 2014 a contender for Greece's best Syrah, while Pavlos Gegas and Julia Harding have consistently marked it down for its pronounced reductive style: Gegas rated the 2017 at 85 points, the 2018 at 83 and the 2020 at 87; Harding scored the 2018 at 14.5 and the 2020 at 16 out of 20. Nostos is Greek for homecoming – with this wine Ted Manousakis returned, after decades in America, to his Cretan village of Vatolakkos, where the Rhône variety is farmed organically and dry-farmed at elevations of 320 to 600 metres.

And I have been at odds with this criticism for years – in both directions. The 2017 – the one Gegas had at 85 – I scored 96 in 2023 at six years of age – one of the stars of that Syrah tasting, delicate and spicy, with an appetising note of bacon. The critically acclaimed 2020, by contrast, which Gegas raised to 87 and Harding to 16 out of 20, I found simply disappointing when tasted alongside the 2021 in a vertical: searing alcohol dominates the palate, charcoal, silicone and rubber smother the fruit, and notes of raisin linger on the finish – the wine tips over into exactly that overripeness Gegas himself usually decries in this estate's wines. 91 points, given without any pleasure. When the estate's sternest critic rewards precisely the vintage I find least convincing, and marks down the one I love, the chief lesson is this: a score reveals almost as much about the taster as it does about the wine.

The 2021 vintage on Crete was a hot, drought-stricken year – three heatwaves without a drop of rain, small, concentrated berries, soft acidity. The island was spared the mainland's fires; the Cretan stress factor was sheer heat. According to the estate's own harvest report, picking began on 4 August, with the last heatwave still underway, yet the Syrah surprised everyone with its long hang time, and the higher sites, at up to 600 metres, kept ripening into mid-September – and were caught by the rain that set in just before the turn of the month. On paper, 2021 nonetheless sits a notch below the classic, well-balanced 2020, and from a vintage like this you'd expect power and ripeness rather than finesse.

In the glass: the opposite. On the nose it is the most expressive of the three – grilled tomato, balsamic, thyme, and – yes, really – grapefruit. On the palate it seems smooth at first, almost a touch flat, the tannin finer and more herbal than in the St Henri and less impenetrable. But then it turns everything on its head: the finish is more powerful than the palate itself, drying, but pleasantly so, and the grapefruit returns, trailing off on a sweet note, carried by that very reductive, savoury-earthy depth that divides opinion. You have to like this style, and I do. It is unquestionably the most interesting of the three; only the Lacules came across as more elegant. And at just over thirty-five euros it is by far the cheapest of the flight.

What's remarkable is that this wine, from what is, on paper, the weaker vintage, punches above its vintage – it translates the heat into tension and intrigue, while beside it, the more highly regarded 2020 comes across as coarser and smothered by its alcohol. For me, it falls just short of the 2017's 96. 95 points – but I'd drink it now.

Conclusion: the vintage is an initial suspicion, not a verdict

By the end of the evening my carefully constructed experiment lay in ruins – in the best possible way. The cool, consistent Australian vintage, hailed by critics as "near perfect", produced the biggest, most concentrated wine of the flight. Greece's year of fires, with the longest heatwave since records began and 125,000 hectares in flames, yielded the two more elegant wines. Vintage logic would have predicted precisely the opposite.

There are two prosaic reasons for this. St Henri is a stylistic decision, not a weather report: Penfolds builds its density from the fruit, and the cool year gave that heft a backbone of acidity and fine-grained tannin – that is the full extent of 2021's contribution. And "Greece 2021" is not a place but an average. The heat was everywhere; salvation was local: in Koroni, the sea breeze twenty-six paces from the water; in Vatolakkos, the altitude and a late-ripening Syrah that hung long enough to catch the September rains. The vintage is grounds for initial suspicion, nothing more – the investigation happens site by site.

The scores: St Henri 97, Nostos 95, Lacules 94+. Today, the Australian is the most complete wine, the Cretan the most interesting and the value pick, the Peloponnesian the one with the longest life ahead of it. And the evening's two most elegant wines came out of that disaster of a summer. The most important thing about this vintage is precisely what you won't find on the label.