Thalvin & Alain Graillot Syrocco 2021
Grape: Syrah
Looks: Deep ruby
On the nose: Muddled red and black fruits, difficult to discern, and not particularly intense. A hint of spice and game. Smoke
On the palate: A bit more muddled dark fruit. Lacking clarity. Medium everything, solid but unremarkable. Tastes like a good Cotes du Rhone, but with more dark fruit than red.
Price Point: 19 EUR / 229 NOK
Terningkast: 3/6
Open to black. The sound of revelers singing starts low and gradually increases in volume. After 8 measures of just vocal, the oud kicks in and we hear it for a short time before the sound of the dudek comes in over (high notes in minor key). Hand drums begin to bang away. “2003” comes up in white over the black screen and fades out. We then dissolve open to a sandy grade of a Saharan desert oasis and do a drone shot sweep to a hotel room with drapes and elaborate tile.
A Jim Broadbent-type (casting to be determined) chats away on the phone while he flips an open bottle of red wine in their hands, contemplatively. The camera zooms in on the label and freezes, like in a Matthew Vaughn or Adam McKay movie. The bottle is from Domaine des Ouled Thaleb, right outside of Ben Slimane, Morocco. The audio makes the phone chatter more parsable and we hear the main character say “I’ve got it” in French.
This seems like the impression that the late Alain Graillot and his sons, who have taken over the business, would like to cultivate about this wine. The marketing text that has circulated about this product frequently refers to “stumbling” upon this Domaine in Morocco on a bicycle tour—also featured on the label. And a lot of this wine’s success, I believe, can be attributed to the ideas that follow:
It’s fun to drink a wine from Morocco, an arab country that doesn’t produce much wine in the eyes of the typical consumer. It is exotic. You expect the wine to be wild, fresh, and exciting. To taste like something you have not quite tasted before.
Collaboration and partnership producing something better than the sum of it’s parts.
Charitably this is sweet and true. One can imagine Graillot rocking up on his bicycle 20 years ago and striking up a business partnership that has helped both parties and produced a wine of a different style that is typical to the region.
Less charitably this is people believing: “we got one of the best winemakers in the Rhone to take vines of untapped potential and turn them into something great”. Which is a logic of minor condescension, and a consequence of the producer-centric view of wine that the market has adopted—people that know basically nothing about making wine (a very large % of the consumer base and wine industry) have begun to view winemakers as wizards that can just make bad grapes taste good. Unfortunately, this—from looking around the internet—seems to be the story most have run with.
This domaine has been making wines since 1920 and I would hazard to guess that all of their wines are probably around this quality, although they may have taken specific stylistic decisions to appeal to a different customer (more oak forward or higher extraction). And I would hazard to guess that because the majority of the vine plantings are from before the project began (average age of 25 years). I would love to try one of their other wines in the future, but there’s little access to them in Norway.
So with me being a bit of a cynic out of the way, is the wine good? Not really, no. Or I guess it depends on your definition of good. It’s a wine, it tastes like a wine. It’s medium everything (body, tannin, acid, alcohol) with red and black fruits and a bit of smoke and game. It is not transportative or particularly delicious, but it is a red wine that tastes like a red wine and is not fucked up or flawed or bombed with chemicals. It is enough, and it’s only 19 EUR. I would recommend giving it a chance on those parameters alone.
Yet wine drinking, and therefore wine buying, is not about “how good” something is in isolation, it’s also about expectations and context. So while the product itself here is decent, the shelf-marketing of this wine: the label, the fantasy text on the back, and preconceptions about what a wine from Morocco should taste like; led me to expect something more vibrant, exciting, and wild. What I got was a solid Syrah for everyday drinking that is relying on context and expectations to sell. That’s fine, but it feels like some sort of invisible contract was broken and I was the mark being deceived.
The imaginary is so powerful. What a label looks like, where the grapes are grown, who the winemaker is, what name / fantasy text you put on the bottle are all just a few of the factors that drive powerful associations in consumers. Reading the tasting notes online for this wine. People mention figs, pepper, game, olives, stewed meats, spice, pomegranate, smoke, and dusty. Are they tasting this wine in a bazaar? And I’m not saying that they’re not getting these things, but it is fascinating that on a wine that is (in my opinion) pretty much a Cote du Rhone swap, they’ve used descriptors that are SO stereotypical of Moroccan and Middle-Eastern climate & cuisine. Terroir is often in your head. And I’m not immune to this in the slightest, I just don’t want to have to consider my latent biases when I’m sitting by the fireplace, having a glass. That’s what happens when the liquid doesn’t live up to the fantasy.
