Syrah in focus, part 3: new world, new homelands

The term “new world” when applied to the wine-making countries of the globe is a misnomer. European vines and wine-making techniques arrived in the Americas with Columbus in the fifteenth century and in Australia in the eighteenth – hardly new. But the phrase lingers on and does at least differentiate the traditional homelands of Vitis Vinifera, the classic wine-producing vine, from the areas to which it travelled with the thirsty adventurers of the Age of Discovery. It’s from the soils of these lands that we will scratch out the last chapter in our Syrah story: from the vineyards of the Americas, New Zealand and, finally, Australia where the grape founded an innovative style now known world-wide as Shiraz.