There’s Something Good To Say About Merlot!
There are, of course, other
reasons Merlot is out of favor with the cognoscenti. There
is an awful lot of mediocre, thin, flavorless wine in
bottles today with Merlot on the label. The grape’s
trajectory through the market has been nothing short of
meteoric. Since the overall wine business is governed by the
same forces – fear and greed – that influence the fate of
other products in our economy, it’s no surprise that once
Merlot went from obscurity to extreme fashionability, there
was no shortage of marketers looking to cash in. The reason
Merlot caught on in the ‘8Os was because the whole country
had suddenly begun to wake up to red wine. Due to its softer
tannins and milder acids, Merlot became known as an
easy-to-drink transition wine. This stimulated a huge rush
to plant. Consumers proved that they would buy virtually
anything as long as it said Merlot. Prices rose, inventories
sold quickly, and this occasioned more planting, more over
cropping, more flavor dilution and a surge of increasingly
boring wines.
A rising tide of virtually
indiscriminate buying sweeps along better producers who are
tempted to raise prices, because their wines too are selling
quickly. Since you can’t fool all of the people all of the
time, Merlot eventually, and predictably, fell victim to a
top down inspired backlash. What had gone around came around
and the result was a sudden logjam of Merlot. No longer the
fashion statement it once was, sales backed up, prices
moderated, and marketers began chasing other
trends.
Which brings us to the
current situation: dollar for dollar, pound for pound, good
quality Merlot is a value. As in, at a comparable price, of
let’s say $15 to $25, it’s often better than Cabernet
Sauvignon or Pinot Noir. This, at any rate, is what my most
recent series of blind tastings indicate. You often get a
more mature wine, with more concentration and length of
flavor. Why? Because in order to be competitive in a
scenario of shrinking demand, the producers have to be
better in order to survive. Here are the cream of the most
recent crop, listed in ascending order of
preference.
Now that sales are a bit
slow, it’s to our advantage to seek out the more mature
examples. The better ones will put the assertion that Merlot
is simply a mellow, light wine without much stuffing to the
test. Not that there weren’t a slew of faceless, nameless,
boring Merlots in my tastings as well. The good ones,
mentioned above, stood out but the reality is that you can’t
just pick a Merlot at random and expect it will taste
anything other than generic. These better quality wines,
however, constitute a great buying opportunity.
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BENZIGER TRINCHERO PAVILLION BURGESS TANGLEY PARCEL STEELE |
