Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher are wine columnists that write the “Tastings” column in the Wall Street Journal’s Food & Drink section. This unpretentious wine expert couple have been married since 1979 and have provided a stream of enjoyable wine columns that are among my favorites and regular reads.
Consider this for next January’s resolution – Dorothy and John suggested this as one of several wine related New Year’s resolutions: “…try a kind of wine you’d shunned for a couple of years.” In view of the below article, I suggest you try a bottle of Merlot if you’ve been biased by the movie “Sideways”
Sideways was unkind to Merlot
Eagles Nest bottled our barrel-aged 2007 Merlot in July of 2009. Our hands-on winemaking style resulted in a color and flavor extraction that were exquisite – resulting in a luxurious Merlot of high character.
Our Merlot won a Silver Medal in the 2010 New York Finger Lakes International Wine Competition and is one of our current favorites.
Presently 100% of our 2007 & 2008 releases of estate wines are medalists, and 88% of our total 2007 & 2008 releases are medalists in highly credible National/ International and Regional wine competitions since last year.
We recommend Merlot as a solid enjoyable mid-bodied red wine, and a recommended entry point to reds for those white wine lovers making – what is generally an inevitable transition – to the world of red wines.
We also made an Estate Blend that included Merlot in 2008 so that is another delight to look forward to.
Hereeeee’s Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher!
Ciao!!!
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Merlot Makes a Comeback
After greedy vintners largely ruined the popular varietal, a tasting of inexpensive wines shows new promise
By DOROTHY J. GAITER AND JOHN BRECHER, WSJ 14 March 2009
This should be the time for inexpensive U.S. Merlot to stage a “Rocky”-like comeback.
Americans fell in love with Merlot, after all, because it was a meatloaf kind of wine, easy and unfussy, round and fairly soft, and we all need that kind of comfort these days. Not only that, but everyone is looking for value and so many Merlots are inexpensive. And Americans are clearly in a buy-American mood, which would surely please our own Pop-Pop, the old Chevy salesman who believed so fervently that “See the USA in your Chevrolet” was not an advertising slogan but a patriotic duty.
Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher give Merlot another try and picked out fifty labels at reasonable prices to see what makers are doing to restore Merlot’s reputation.
The problem, of course, is that most inexpensive Merlot has been really bad for a really long time. After Merlot became popular overnight more than a decade ago, wineries churned out oceans of industrial liquid called Merlot that seemed more like something concocted by the mad scientists on the television show “Fringe.”
The wines, far more often than not, were sweet, simple, heavy, dripping with vanilla and overly alcoholic. Merlot became a national joke — and then, in 2004, “Sideways” provided the punch line. After our tastings through the years, we have urged you to avoid the Merlot aisle like the purple plague.
Despite all this, Merlot has remained very popular. While its rate of growth has slowed over the years, sales continue to rise, according to Nielsen Co., which tracks sales in food and drug stores. In fact, Merlot appears to have overtaken White Zinfandel as America’s third most-popular varietal by volume (after Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon).
However, wineries have finally stopped planting Merlot in every nook and cranny and thus creating watery grapes grown who-knows-where. After studying the 2008 California grape crush report, wine and grape brokerage firm Ciatti Co. reported that the Merlot crush was down fully 25% for the year and added: “Acreage transitions away from Merlot over the last four years drove major supply adjustments downward. The 2008 Merlot crop is now at its lowest level in more than eight years.”
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