Stuart Walton traces the myths of Shiraz—and reflects on the glorious past and sad recent history of Shirazi wine.
It was established beyond doubt in 1998 that the Syrah wine grape, known as Shiraz throughout much of the Anglophone world, has no genetic connection to the ancient Farsi provincial city of Shiraz in southern Iran.
Viticulture was practised in the region in antiquity, at least as far back as 2500 BCE. It is thought to have begun systematically when vine cuttings were brought down from the hills to the Persian lowlands, but its rudiments are of much more ancient provenance, as was attested by the wine residue in one of a set of six Neolithic clay jars that came to light in the Zagros mountains of northern Iran in 1968. They were over 7,000 years old.
There is no evidence of any genetic parentage of Persian grapes in the Syrah of the Rhône Valley and Languedoc. The brooding red grape of Hermitage and Côte-Rôtie once arose from a fortuitous natural crossing of the now all-but-vanished Dureza variety with a white grape, Mondeuse Blanche, still clinging on in the eastern reaches of Savoie. Some think its name might have been an abbreviation of the ancient city of Siracusa, but it shares no DNA with any Sicilian grape either.
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In misty-headed legend, the vine was brought back from the Albigensian Crusades to the Bible lands in 1224 by a wounded French knight, Gaspard de Stérimberg, who established the first vineyard in Hermitage. The wine was so called because Gaspard was known in the literature as a “hermit of the mountains.” He had been granted a refuge in the hills by the Queen Consort, Blanche of Castile, in which to recover from his ailments, wandering the slopes alone in a state of 13th-century PTSD. If he did plant a vine cutting, it wasn’t Syrah.
This was the myth retailed in an old French textbook, Oenologie Française (1826), from where it was culled and quoted by the Edinburgh-born British government official James Busby in a work of 1834, Journal of a recent visit to the principal vineyards of Spain and France. It was Busby who carried the first European vine cuttings to Australia, including some Syrah, which he classified as “scyras,” noting that it had its origins in Persia. Thus do myths propagate, rattling down history’s rails like runaway trains.
There was an occasional tradition of beefing up thinner vintages of European wine with sturdier stuff from hotter climes, and just as Algerian wines were once used to turbo-charge flimsy Burgundy, deep red Persian wine probably went into some of the thinner, sourer French vintages to give them silkier texture and more body. The consonance of ruby-red Persian wine and the local grape on which the reds of the northern Rhône depended surely sealed the otherwise unevidenced historical link.
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A lyrical celebration of Shirazi wine
It was hardly a link that dishonored one of the heartland regions of French viticulture anyway. Shirazi wine was famously celebrated in the ecstatic lyric poetry of the 14th-century poet Hafez, whose pavilioned tomb still stands in the present-day city. In the first of his poems to be translated into Latin (by a Lorrain linguist, Franciscus Meninski, in 1680), the singer calls out “Come, o wine-pourer; circulate a cup and pass it; / since love seemed easy at first, but soon troubles arose.” Here wine fulfils its venerable role of soothing the love-rent heart, an enterprise in which the poet calls on his spiritual guide to “[s]tain the prayer-mat with wine” if necessary. Elsewhere, in his cups, he wonders, “What drunkenness is this that brings me hope?”
Truth and wisdom resided in the goblet. “Last night the wise tavern-master deciphered the enigma,” Hafez vouchsafes. “Gazing at the lines traced in the cup of wine, he unravelled our awaiting fate.” Even if, as certain scholars maintain, the wine here is purely metaphorical of divine benevolence, its concrete analogue is a drink with the power to intoxicate, and one whose repute, already glittering, would only grow with the tales of travellers.
In the words of Hafez himself, Shirazi is “a dark red wine that smells like musk,” blended in later times from the ink-dark Shiraz Sharabi and Sahebi grapes. To the French jeweller Jean Chardin, writing up his voyages in A Journey to Persia (1686), this “excellent and famous” wine, “for the beauty of its color and the delight of its taste is considered to be the best in Persia and throughout the East.” It was noted for its subtlety too: “It is not one of those strong wines that pleases the palate straight away.”
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 led to the ritual smashing of bottles and wineries throughout the country. A penalty of public flogging was instituted for the crime of winemaking. Among diasporic communities of Iranians in Europe, restaurants are said occasionally to try to pass off Australian or South African Shiraz as the elixir of Fars. Nobody is fooled. Real Shirazi wine has passed into virtual extinction.
