This is a wine that can be enjoyed casually with chili con carne or grilled burgers.
Pax is a young family-run winery that started in 2000.
Owners Pax and Pam Marley each aspired to become Master Sommeliers.
They study hard every day, meet other like-minded friends at a study group, and fall in love.
Pax grew up in a family with no connection to wine and studied art history in college.
While working part-time at a restaurant and thinking about his future, he soon became deeply interested in the history of the drink known as "wine."
When the two of them traveled to France to study wine, they became completely fascinated by the relationship between grapes, people, and the soil, and the culture of "wine" that is deeply rooted in Europe.
In 1997, the couple moved to California and decided to pursue a career in the wine industry.
Pax was then hired as a wine buyer for Dean & DeLuca, where he was inspired by a different genre of drink: California wine, building on his knowledge of European wine.
Of these, the most shocking to Pax was Syrah. He began to realize that if California's Pauillac is Oakville and Pomerol is Carneros' Merlot, then there was no California Syrah to rival the Northern Rhone.
In 2000, he started Pax Wine Cellars with the aim of producing Syrah from the vineyards he felt he had come across.
What these vineyards have in common is that they are all located in the cool climate of Sonoma County and Mendocino, producing wines that are full-bodied and delicately expressive.
The Pax brand, which focused on a niche angle, gained momentum, and Pax and Pam, along with some investors, launched the Wind Gap brand in 2006.
While Pax is a brand specializing in Syrah and Rhone varieties, Wind Gap is a hip brand full of playfulness, releasing not only Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, but also less familiar grape varieties such as Trousseau Gris and Valdiguier.
However, in 2018, due to disagreements with investors, he decided to divest from the Wind Gap brand and focus on his own Pax brand.
Currently, Pax focuses on Syrah, which has texture and freshness reminiscent of the Northern Rhone, as well as rare varieties such as Trousseau Gris and Valdiguier, which they worked on during their time at Wind Gap.
The style is unmistakably "New California", with no pesticides or substances not found in nature being used in the fields, natural fermentation using indigenous yeasts, and minimal addition of sulfites.