By Ben Thomas
Do you know what the wine varieties mamaia, carmine, evmolpia and ederena have in common? They’re actually different names from around the world for the same grape: merlot.
Sorry for the trick question but it helps to illustrate just how far and wide merlot is grown and enjoyed. It’s one of the world’s most widely planted grapes – from the Ukraine to Uruguay, and Israel to France, where it’s the country’s single-most planted grape.
It’s believed merlot gets its name from the blackbirds that are so fond of its ripe grapes in south-west France. These birds are known as merlau in the ancient Occitan language.
More often than not, this fleshy, easy drinking red is blended with cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc, rather than made into single varietal wine.
Its juicy plum, blackberry and herbal flavours help give the cabernets a sweet mid-palate (think of it as the jam in the middle of a doughnut on your tongue) and soften the austerity of cabernet’s firm tannins.
There’s a lot of merlot planted in Australia – it’s third behind shiraz and cabernet sauvignon – and it is used widely as a blender. Indeed, I reckon the ratio of cabernet-merlot bottles to straight merlot I open would be about five to one.
The best merlot examples are considered to be from the right bank of Bordeaux’s Gironde River. In the past decade or so, it has played a larger role in the blends of Bordeaux’s left bank as producers seek to create softer, earlier drinking wines. While it’s become more important in Bordeaux, the opposite could be said for the grape in California.
The decline has a lot to do with the 2004 film
Sideways and its lead character Miles Raymond, who uttered: “If anyone orders merlot I’m leaving. I’m not drinking any effing merlot.” California winemaker Randy Ullom says the comments were justified.
“People started planting it everywhere,” says Ullom, who has made wines for Kendall-Jackson in California for more than 20 years. “When it took off, merlot was planted on the north and south coast and people said, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to get on this bandwagon,’ so they started planting it everywhere. You’d get a herbaceousness from the central valleys [that had a detrimental effect on the wines].
“At the beginning, if you were to put all California’s merlot grapes together to make a single wine out of it, it would have been pretty good. Soon after [if you did the same thing] it would have been good, then so-so, then bad, then to, ‘Oh my God, we’ve bastardised the whole thing’.”
But Ullom says there have been long-term benefits and merlot again stands tall next to California’s best-known grapes; pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon and zinfandel.
“All the low-quality vineyards were ripped out because nobody wanted them. It was a natural selection thing, where only the fittest and best have survived,” he says. “But merlot’s coming back now. If you put everybody’s merlot into a big pot now and made a wine, you’d have a pretty nice wine.”
