What’s in a name? Tim James looks for an answer

A shiraz by any other name would smell as sweet, surely? As redolent of chocolate, mocha, oak? Not necessarily, in the opinion of many local – and French, New Zealand and Californian – winemakers and marketers. The synonym ‘syrah’ (pronounced sirrah, stressing the second syllable and vibrating the r if you want to get closer to sounding French) for some conveys a different image: of a wine more refined, more peppery-spicy, less smoky – in short, more akin to the classic reds of the northern Rhône valley than to the robust Oz heartiness that has, rightly or wrongly, come to typify New World shiraz.

More and more South Africans now deploy with insouciance the French name for the increasingly fashionable variety that appeared on local labels only as shiraz until the mid 1990s. It was then, after some worthy forerunners, that a wine appeared to alert drinkers to the possibly glorious future of this variety in the Cape – and also, incidentally, alerted us to the skills of a winemaker.

The wine was Stellenzicht Syrah 1994; the winemaker was André van Rensburg, who insisted that this wine was different from ‘old style, sweaty, horsy shiraz’ and needed a distinctive varietal reference, and got the authorities to officially accept ‘syrah’ as a synonym.

A decade later, out of the 450-odd wines made here from this grape (according to the latest Platter guide), something more than a tenth proclaim themselves ‘syrah’. More surprising is that over the last year or two about a dozen producers, from Boschendal to Zevenwacht, actually went to the trouble, expense and marketing risk of changing the branding of their wine from Shiraz to Syrah. Glen Carlou is one such, and winemaker David Finlayson gives the standard answer when asked why the change was made: style – the winery’s owners, Hess, looked at their international holdings and decided that this wine fitted in better behind the international/French version of the name. Bon Cap, who’ve also changed, give a similar reason, and so do most of the others.

Origins and confusions

Syrah and shiraz sound close enough to suggest that one word might be a corruption of the other – but this is apparently unlikely. Modern vine identification research has shown that the grape is native to France (a cross between the black grape dureza and the white mondeuse blanche), but tradition identified two foreign cities somehow involved in its origins or its journey to France. On a semantic level, ‘syrah’ seems to derive from Syracuse in Sicily, ‘shiraz’ plausibly evoking the the city in old Persia and the once-supposed Middle East origins of the grape.

The reasons for the name difference in the southern hemisphere are as hazy as the precise timing of the grape’s appearance in the early vineyards of the Cape and Australia. Certainly it was grown in South Africa first – perhaps among the earliest plantings, and it is possible that shiraz was among the Cape vines that went to Australia with the explorer Gregory Blaxland around 1816-18.

Given that it is only in these two countries that the name shiraz has been used until recently, could the name also have travelled from here to Australia (as ‘scyras’, possibly) – where the grape was to be so much more widely planted than in the Cape?

Shiraz, by that name, is now internationally associated above all with Australia. The French, of course, seldom refer to varieties on labels – certainly not in areas like Hermitage and Côte Rôtie, where syrah arguably finds its noblest expression. Which returns us to the intriguing possibility of hinting at style through the name used on the label.

It is not only in the Cape, however, that the choice is being exercised. Ironically, some French producers (in non-classic areas), desperate to compete with Australia on the supermarket shelves, have moved in the opposite direction to be allowed to call their wines Shiraz. Similarly, in the USA, where Australia has had enormous success with shiraz made either fruity and simple or altogether more ambitious, some wineries have been rebranding their Syrahs. (Californian consumers must also cope with the confusion of a different, though not totally unrelated it now appears, variety called petite sirah. But don’t even begin to worry about syrah proper occasionally being called petite syrah in parts of the Rhône.)

New Zealand, in Australia’s shadow, released its first varietal wine made from the grape in 1989: its flavour, thought its maker, Alan Limmer of Stonecroft Winery, was quite foreign to the dominant Australian (Barossa) style. So he called it ‘Syrah’. Now, as New Zealand’s shiraz production grows, and gains prestige, both names are used – the French version probably in the lead – though it is not clear that the selection is always made on a stylistic basis.

Only Australia, it would seem, remains aloof to the split: although there are, in fact, some wines not made in the blockbuster Barossa style, the name Shiraz seems sacrosanct (Balmoral Syrah being an anomaly to prove the rule).

Of course, especially given that the name choice resides with producers and marketers, whether the style of their wine corresponds to what they imagine it does is sometimes doubtful. In the Cape, it does often seem that calling one’s wine Syrah rather than Shiraz is more of a gesture towards pretentiousness than towards helpfully hinting to the consumer. André van Rensburg, who started the trend here, thinks it all pretty irrelevant now – his Vergelegen version sits happily with the traditional local name.