Petite Sirah I Love You | A Petite Sirah Advocacy Organization (original) (raw)
BATF is now considering whether or not to allow the name Durif to be used as a synonym for Petite Sirah. I think that there’s a fair bit of confusion on this subject, so it might be useful if I simply review what Petite Sirah is.
To my mind, Petite Sirah is Durif. There is no doubt about this. Some Petite Sirah vineyards, especially old ones, often contain a few vines of other varieties, but when we analyzed the DNA of vines that look like Petite Sirah, more than 90% of them are Durif. The few that are not turn out to be Peloursin, which is the mother of Durif and looks a lot like it.
Old red vineyards are mixtures. You usually find four, or five, or eight, or nine, or ten varieties in there. I’ve been in some of the old Petite Sirah vineyards, and I’ve found all kinds of weird stuff. But the same thing happens if you go in an old Zin vineyard, or even an old Cab vineyard. You will find a lot of other varieties. So, everything that looked like Petite Sirah that we sampled was Durif. We don’t need to worry that not all Petite Sirah is Durif, because I would say that Petite Sirah is Durif, no questions asked.
So, what that means, when we say Petite Sirah is Durif, is that it’s a synonym… that’s simply two names for the same variety, just like Shiraz and Syrah; two names for the same variety. It doesn’t mean that Durif is like this, and Petite Sirah’s like this, and there’s some differences. It’s just two names.
Now what about the relationship between Petite Sirah and Syrah? What we now know is that Petite Sirah is the offspring of Syrah. Every grape variety has two parents. In the case of Petite Sirah, those two parents are Syrah and Peloursin. That means that half of the genetic makeup of Petite Sirah came directly from Syrah. Syrah is the father of Petite Sirah in the true genetic sense.
Clones are just variants within a variety; so there may well be clones within Petite Sirah, but it’s not correct to say that Petite Sirah is a clone of Syrah. They’re two distinct varieties, but they’re as closely related as two varieties can be.