After acquiring a small piece of property in this area a few years ago-thus an interest in the local wines-I noticed a recurring pattern. Examining Jim Fetzer's selections from Ceàgo Vinegarden, I preferred some to others, but it was a profoundly centered petite sirah that made me sit up and take notice. As I sampled the super-natural products of Frey Vineyards, inconsistency ruled the day until a succulent petite sirah brought everything into focus. Gaining exposure to Eaglepoint Ranch, I found integrity across the board, but the wine that really elevated my eyebrows was a deep, complex petite sirah.

Although I'm not a die-hard devotee of this teeth-staining varietal ("zinfandel on steroids," as one popular profile puts it), these wines were something else. Dark and rich, to be sure, but more balanced than blockbuster, possessed of a supple gravitas.

  "It's the best grape they grow up there," agreed Joel Peterson, who sources grapes from all over the North Coast for his wines at Ravenswood, when I reported my findings. "Petite sirah can be heavy and clumsy, but in Mendocino it has brightness."

  "The petite sirah is incredible," raved Jeff Cohn, who's made several Eaglepoint Ranch designates for Rosenblum Cellars. "It produces a really powerful wine, but it's not just big and dark-it's graceful. It has layers and finesse."

  "Let's be honest," said Alan York, who until recently oversaw the McNab Ranch vineyard that produced the Ceàgo wine. "Petite sirah is a coarse grape-it's a blender, for toughness and strength. But you see its most noble qualities in Mendocino County. It's a really good example of getting the right variety in the right place."

California is generally acknowledged to be a better place for petite sirah than its ancestral home: the Rhône Valley, where it began life as durif, a love child of the meaty syrah and the thick-skinned, less celebrated peloursin. In the view of its own countrymen, durif got the worst traits of each parent: Mom's off-putting astringency plus Dad's thin skin, the latter rendering it vulnerable to rot-an insult that inevitably led to injury as durif also ripens late, making exposure to autumn rains a virtual certainty. As a result, it's now almost impossible to find the grape anywhere in France, where it was once demeaned as "grosse syrah."

  In America it was a different story. After durif arrived on the West Coast in the 1880s, it was mistakenly called petite syrah, an old French nickname for its lower-yielding father and now an affectionately entrenched misnomer, seeing as how the inky, chewy durif is the opposite of small. As a matter of fact, the grape's gross qualities (including high yields) are what made it popular in California, where it was typically planted alongside zinfandel to lend body and color to that more lightweight (!) variety. A closely guarded historical secret of Napa Valley viticulture is that, as late as 1960, its most widely planted variety was petite sirah. Most of that acreage has long since been converted to cabernet sauvignon.

  Although durif and cabernet ripen on roughly the same schedule, when the weather gets really hot, "Bordeaux grapes shut down and go into heavy-maintenance mode, while petite sirah continues to remain physiologically active," York explains. "You can have unripe cabernet and perfectly ripe petite sirah right next to each other in the vineyard." Inland Mendocino County is hotter and drier than Napa in summer, but its more northerly latitude confers cooler nighttime temperatures and a shorter frost-free growing season. ("We go below fifty a lot, particularly in autumn," York points out. "Retention of acidity is much greater here than people think.") For all these reasons, Mendocino isn't a great place for cabernet, but as York says, "If you can keep petite sirah out there into late October or early November and it doesn't rain, it's the star of the show."

  This is consistent with the conventional wisdom that great wine grapes are grown in places where they're just barely capable of ripening. "We're right on the edge of petite sirah possibilities," confirms Casey Hartlip, manager of the Eaglepoint Ranch, which underscores all of the above observations. At 1,800 feet above sea level, its vines lag a couple of weeks behind even those in local vineyards, which tend to bud and come in later than those in Napa or Sonoma. "Lots of times [harvest] is a nail-biter," Hartlip comments. "You really have to pay attention to your crop load-you can't be dumb or greedy. What helps is that when the temperature spikes come mid-September, we're not even close to picking-the fruit isn't ripe yet, so it isn't as vulnerable to heat blasts."

  Most Mendocino petite sirah is planted on moderately elevated benches, where good drainage and air circulation inhibit the grape's tendency to rot. "I grow it only at the top of the slope," reports Paul Dolan, a partner in the Mendocino Wine Company (new owner of the 74-year-old Parducci winery), who planted petite sirah a few years ago at his Dark Horse Ranch. "The ones that excel are on the Ôbathtub ring,' three or four or five hundred feet above the valley floor. With good airflow and exposure to the sun, it's the most interesting variety of all the reds."

  Perhaps the most notable petite sirah plot at this elevation is the dry-farmed, biodynamic McNab Ranch block between Ukiah and Hopland. Bob Blue, who has made McNab petite for Bonterra for five years, says that the vines, planted on their own roots in 1976, were the only ones on the property to escape replanting in the 1990s. "The tannins have been tamed by age," Blue opines. "In some places petite sirah ripens too fast, but here it gets through the hot part of fall into the cool part without drying up. It gets ripe, but not overripe."

  This seems to be the crux. Despite inland Mendocino's searing summer daytime temperatures, its red wines can be surprisingly pretty-the zinfandels are brighter and more briary than higher-profile versions to the south, and the petite sirahs are...well, not unlike the big, blackberryish, multifaceted Sonoma zins that ushered that grape back to prominence before it was kidnapped by mind-numbing alcohol and residual sugar. Upon entering the winery, durif's biggest drawback-tannin-is reined in via small fermenters, gentle punchdowns, early pressing and long barrel aging.

  It also helps to have experienced plants. The oldest petite sirah vines in California are found east of Hopland, where the 1888 Poor Ranch was replanted (post-phylloxera) in the 1940s and '50s and McDowell Valley Vineyards'

  Gibson block dates back to 1919. McDowell and Saracina extract intense wines from the latter plot while Fetzer produces a supremely well-rounded one from the former. To the north, wineries like Lolonis, Graziano and Fife craft diverse petites from seasoned vineyards in Redwood Valley, while Parducci has begun bottling a finely structured reserve from its wizened vines near Ukiah.

  But elderly estates are no longer the only source of good petite sirah. Since 1995, when durif acreage hit an all-time low, California North Coast grape growers-inspired by the Rhône-varietal movement and an international trend toward full-bodied wines-have planted 1,000 acres of new petite sirah vineyards, almost a third of it in Mendocino County. One good example is Golden Vineyards, a biodynamic ranch that grows the Martella Petite Sirah; the 2003 scored 93 points in this issue of Wine & Spirits.

  "There's a lot of support for petite sirah in Mendocino County," observes Dr. Carole Meredith, the University of California winegrape geneticist who confirmed that petite sirah is durif. "It's a little less mainstream there, so people may pride themselves on it more."

  Which makes sense when you might just have the world's best environment for growing it. For my money, that's a pretty good foundation for an authoritative identity.