GRAPE VARIETIES: BORDEAUX REDS

Bordeaux Grapes: There’s Four—Wait, One More; There’s Five, Ain’t No Jive; Hang On, There’s Six, No More Tricks.

It’s an old joke: ‘Tell somebody there’s ten thousand stars in the sky, he’ll take your word for it. Put up a ‘Wet Paint’ sign, he’ll have to find out for himself.’

Likewise, wine grapes. I wrote a column recently suggesting that appellation law allows five red wine grapes in Bordeaux—cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc, malbec and petit verdot—and was instantly assailed by wine writers wiser than moi and reminded that there are actually six. I had, of course, omitted carménère, a grape Grandpèred in to appease major fifth-growth players like Château Clerc-Milon, whose 14,000 cases per year contain about one percent of this strange, loamy, smoky fruit. Now, I can’t imagine how 1% of anything short of anthrax spores could overly influence a bottle of wine, but if the good folks at Clerc-Milon feel that their single acre of carménère is worth making me look like a total tête merde on my own website in front of literally dozens of readers, I wish upon their French fannies an Exodus 8: 1 – 4: A plague of frogs.
Real ones, too—not their next door neighbors.

The purpose of the opening joke, of course, was to illustrate that if I had instead chosen to write about the hundred varietals legally permitted in Sherry prior to the phylloxera infestation of 1894, not one of these sad-sack sack scholars would have been able to tell me what they were. Hell, let’s be honest: Most of them couldn’t have told me what three are allowed today without a Google grape grope.

The point is, when wines are blended—and to some extent nearly all are—it’s for a reason, and it’s often good wine education to learn why one ‘auxiliary’ grape is preferred over another. It can be tradition, price, final acidity, alcohol or tannin—or all the above—but every winemaker except the most cynical is after a certain positive synergy of juice weights, flavors and aromatics.

A vivisection of Bordeaux’s sanctified sextet offers an overview of why these particular blends may in fact be the paradigm of wine-world solidarność.

Cabernet Sauvignon: Not the most widely planted grape in Bordeaux nor the easiest to ripen, cabernet sauvignon wears the appellation’s kingly crown nonetheless—perhaps because of the six noble, it’s the most reliable in terms of varietal integrity—cab-based wines are instantly recognizable for their brooding but elegant crush of blackberry, currant and dark cherry tastes. Certainly, the grape lends itself to Bordeaux’s deepest, most potent bottlings, and non-fruit descriptors often include tobacco and cedar, and, when pyrazine linger in less than fully-ripened clusters, an unmistakable note of bell pepper and green olives. Strangely, though the scent of eucalyptus is often noted in cabernets grown near eucalyptus groves, no connection has yet been found to explain it. These days, it’s easier to explain cab’s origin: It is not, as previously believed, a particularly ancient varietal (Pliny’s ‘biturica’ winds up being closer to carménère), but 1996 DNA testing proved that it is a relatively recent cross between cabernet franc and sauvignon blanc, neither of which it conspicuously resembles—like if Obama’s biracial parents had produced Sandra Oh.

Merlot: Speaking of Sandra Oh, I would miss no opportunity to rub terroir in the face of urban mythologists: Following Sideways, any change in merlot sales were too negligible to notice. And not only that, but, screw Miles anyway—in its most perfect prosopopeia, merlot turns cabernet’s elegance into juicy-fruit splendiferousness. Upon the right bank of the Gironde estuary (looking downstream, toward the sea), merlot has found a viticultural Valhalla; the ferrous clay subsoil, unlike the left bank’s gravel and limestone, retains moisture, and in the appellations of Saint-Émilion and Pomerol, merlot-based wines burst with velvety plum, chocolatey cherry and all the intensity of the fruit cake spectrum—without the astringency often associated with cabernet. With 172,000 acres under tillage (compared to 72,000 for cabernet sauvignon), merlot is by far the most prolific grape in Bordeaux. Named for it color companion the blackbird (merle in French, and in Latin, hilariously, turdus merula), the cultivar appears to have originated in Italy, where it still produces good, but not spectacular wines.

Cabernet Franc: When merlot is not the danseur noble, it’s often used as a softening agent for cabernet sauvignon, but when it takes the lead, it prefers a pas de deux with cabernet franc, which shares its affinity for cooler, heavier Right Bank soils. Characteristically lighter than its scion cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc’s reputation is built upon its fusion finesse, adding aromatics—typically, floral scents like violets, rose petals and white blossoms—and tart red fruit flavors like raspberry and pie cherries. Although an argument could be made that cab franc’s true glory-hole is not in Bordeaux but in the Loire (or the Finger Lakes of New York, in Canadian ice wine or in the terra rossa of Croatia’s Savudrija peninsula), you’d still have to explain Château Cheval Blanc—the Premier Grand Cru Classé Saint-Émilion which is mostly cabernet franc.

Malbec: This inky, scowling, dark-skinned grape has hop-scotched around France like an Armée de Terre brat, using more pseudonyms than Prince; nearly a thousand malbec monikers have been recorded by ampelographer Pierre Galet. Called côt noir in the southwest (where it is responsible for the famed ‘Black Wine of Cahors’), auxerroix in Burgundy and The Grape Formerly Known As Pressac in Bordeaux, other synonyms include mouranne, medoc noir, vesparo, jacobain and estrangey—though, estrangely, malbec argenté is not malbec, but a variety of the grape abouriou. Better suited to the cooler, dryer, high-altitude climate of Argentina, malbec is now the most widely grown varietal in that country, with more than 61,000 acres currently under cultivation. In France, where it produces a richly tannic blend of boysenberry, brown spice, leather and pomegranate flavors, plantings have dwindled to a few hundred acres.

Carménère: And then there’s this: A crappy little reminder that I know less about wine than I pretend to. And as suits such a buzz-killer, carménère can be gamey, tarry, vegetal and quite prepared to go all Philippe Pétain with the white-flag when faced with an invading army; in this case, sap-sucking aphids. Annihilated in the same phylloxera epidemic that whittled down the Sherry varietals, carménère was slated for resurrection with the other noble grapes of Bordeaux, but proved by far the most difficult, and today, as it fades to oblivion in Bordeaux, it’s found new life in Chile, where it was, until DNA proved otherwise, thought to be merlot. There, it serves its original purpose, being used primarily to blend in color and smoky overtones to Bordeaux-style cab/merlot blends.

Petit Verdot: Compared to new kid on the block cabernet sauvignon, petit verdot is a thick-skinned, late-ripening, long-suffering squatter. Scant good it’s done them: So much more reliably does cab ripen that most of the old petit verdot plots have been torn out and planted to its more reliable consorts—today, less than a thousand acres of petit verdot remain, nearly all in the Médoc, where it’s used to ‘stiffen’ Left Bank blends. As a stand alone varietal, petit verdot is meh³, tannic and sour; it does its best work in Margaux, where in Troisième Cru Château Palmer it may compose up to a tenth of the blend. In California, however, it strikes the Forty Niners’ mother lode, and today is the single most expensive varietal you can buy by the ton.

This would conclude today’s broadcast of allowable Bordeaux varietals if it wasn’t for the slightly inconvenient truth that the neighborhood has been integrated since the Romans were playing Occupy Saint-Émilion in the Second Century.
The types of white grapes that Bordeaux permits is fodder for future folios—I’ll just say that there are eight, and if you could tell me in advance which one I am going to forget, it will save me a ton of time, taint and personal distress.