Syrah’s spiritual home is the northern Rhône, in the small, hilly appellations of Hermitage, Côte-Rôtie, and Cornas. This is as far north as Syrah will ripen, producing intense, gamey, long-lived red wines. In 1831, Scotsman James Busby travelled around England, France, and Spain, commissioned by the Australian government to bring back grape varieties potentially suitable for Australia’s warm climate. He brought nearly seven hundred grape cuttings, including Syrah, or Shiraz as it became known in Australia.
The name change has always been confusing: why did it develop a completely different name in Australia? I had always thought that because the Australian wine industry developed in relative isolation, the name of the grape had mutated locally, just as grape varieties had taken on different names throughout Europe. Australians also speculated that the grape had come from Shiraz in Persia (modern-day Iran, which is today the biggest grower of table grapes) rather than from France.
I was recently reading A History and Description of Modern Wines by Cyrus Redding, a textbook about wine first published in 1833, around the same time James Busby brought his cuttings to Australia. It’s an interesting book and still very readable. He lists dozens of different grape varieties grown across Europe, some of them now forgotten (Orleans, a grape once important in Germany), some familiar (Merlot, Grenache), and others that are familiar but spelt differently (Pineau, for instance). His description of the northern Rhône is the most surprising: "Hermitage is produced from the Scyras, or Shiraz grape." The name Syrah is not mentioned anywhere in the book.
This small detail would make it seem that the grape is called Shiraz in Australia because that was one of its French names when Busby was travelling around the country. Redding also notes that "it is said to have been brought from Persia," again showing that this theory about its origins is not an Australian invention, but one that had previously existed in France.
I went to James Busby’s account of his travels around France and Spain, Journal of a Tour through some of the vineyards of Spain and France (1833), to see what he called the grape. He spells it as Ciras, listing Scyras as an alternative. There seem to have been many spellings of the grape’s name. Busby spells it Ciras, Redding Scyras, and John Livingstone-Learmonth’s book The Wines of the Northern Rhône lists other spellings such as Syra, Chira, and Sirac. All of these spellings revolve around the word Shiraz, again suggesting that the origin for the Australian name is French.
Busby takes the story of the grape's Persian origins further: "the tradition ... exists in the neighbourhood [of Hermitage], that this variety was originally brought from Shiraz, in Persia, by one of the Hermits, who resided in the Hermitage of which the ruins still exist on the Hill where the celebrated wine of that name is produced." The theory that the grape came from Persia persisted until quite recently, but it was disproved by Carole Meredith of UC Davis. She discovered that the grape is probably the off-spring of Dureza, a grape found in nearby Ardèche, and Mondeuse, from Savoie to the east of the Rhône.
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| the Hermitage chapel, which dates back to the 1200s; photo from foodwineclick.com |
Modern-day clones of Shiraz (and Chardonnay, which Busby calls Pineau Blanc or Chaudeny) in Australia can be traced back to Busby's original cuttings, but the grape nowadays grown in the northern Rhône is probably quite different from that of the 1830s. Cloning since the 1970s has focused on developing grapes with bigger berries, producing more expansive and riper flavours. The original, smaller Syrah still exists, called Sérine in Côte-Rôtie (as Redding himself notes) and Petite Syrah in Hermitage – not to be confused with California’s Petite Sirah, whose origins are yet another story.
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