Durif is a well-travelled black grape variety, revealed in 1999 as probably a cross of peloursin with syrah, propagated eponymously by a Dr Durif in south eastern France in the 1880s.
Today it has almost disappeared from France but it is still cultivated in both North and South America as the dominant proportion of all vines called petite sirah.
As Durif, it was long grown in Australia’s rutherglen making a prodigiously inky, alcoholic wine of surprising quality. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was enthusiastically planted by riverina growers who value how it retains deep colour and strong flavour even when heavily cropped and are responsible for over half the national total of 500 ha/1,250 acres in 2012.
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