I'm 'Sideways' With Merlot

In the interest of full disclosure, I must start this column by letting you know that I do not like merlot.  Although I dislike it for the same reasons that Miles in Sideways dislikes it, my disdain for the wine began long before the movie.

The basic issue for me is that traditionally, merlot has been either very good and very expensive or affordable and mediocre.  Since I don’t like to spend a lot of money for wine and I don’t like mediocre wine, there wasn’t much for me to like about merlot.

I think the problem really goes back to the merlot grape itself.

  To make really good merlot, you have to do everything right.  You have to plant the grapes in just the right soil with just the right climate.  You have to thin the grapes during the growing season (which means you reduce your harvest size by 50% or more).  You have to thin the leaf canopy. You have to pick the grapes at just the time. 

If you do all these things right, you have a very good wine, a very good, very expensive wine.  You see, all these things tend to make merlot more expensive to grow than a lot of other wine grapes.  This in turn discourages farmers from planting merlot, which makes good merlot more scarce.  And all of us know what scarcity does – it only increases the price of the scarce product.

So, for me, merlot was the fairly expensive wine that was traditionally made in the Bordeaux region of France.  These are some of the most famous, and many would argue, best wines in the world.  Personally, I wouldn’t know because I cannot afford to pay hundreds of dollars for a single bottle.

Of course, as I learned when I lived in California in the early to mid ‘90s, merlot has been planted in fits and starts there since the 1970s.  There was a surge in popularity in the 1970s and again in the early 1990s.  I tried many of these wines, but they were never very good.  Of course, as a I later learned, the reason they weren’t very good is that the growers were in a hurry to cash in on the popularity of merlot.  Thus, they didn’t choose their sites carefully, they overwatered and they didn’t thin the grapes.  The result was generally boring, thin, uninteresting wines at best and vegetal, sour wines at worst.

Despite this, the public sucked up most of this terrible wine.  Why?
  I think it’s a combination of factors – the word “merlot” is easy to pronounce (much easier than cabernet sauvignon or petite verdot or carmenere or sangiovese), which makes it easy to order.  It’s inexpensive and you do not have to age it (‘cuz it’s never gonna get better). 

Perhaps the most important factor, though, was the 60 Minutes piece in 1991 that explored “The French Paradox.”  As you may recall, the doctor featured in that story theorized that the reason the French eat more red meat and cheese than Americans and yet have lower incidences of heart problems is their consumption of red wine.

Suddenly, lots of people decided that they could get healthier without cutting out their beloved animal products.  All they had to do was add red wine to their diet.  Merlot, for the reasons I describe above, was the perfect choice.

Of course, as merlot grew in popularity, even more growers came to the party and planted merlot.  The quality of inexpensive merlot reached a low point in the late 1990s.  And then something wonderful for wine lovers happened – the movie Sideways.  In that movie, the protagonist, a self-annointed wine snob, decries the popularity of low-quality merlot in favor of pinot noir. 

Singlehandedly, that movie changed the wine-drinking habits of tens of thousands of American wine drinkers.  Almost overnight, merlot plummeted in popularity.  Personally, I think it’s the best thing that could have ever happened to merlot.  All those growers who never should have planed merlot where they did began ripping up the vines and planting other things (pinot noir in many cases, which isn’t necessarily a good idea, either, but that’s a subject for a future column). 

The folks who kept their merlot grapes tended to be those who had more carefully matched their merlot grapes to their vineyard and were, as a result, already making good wine.  The net effect of Sideways was to right the merlot ship.  So, does that mean I now like merlot?  Well, yes and no.  I still think that inexpensive, good merlot is difficult.  But I also think that the overall quality of reasonably-priced (i.e., less than $20) merlot is on the way up.  Those who are growing merlot grapes are doing so because they have the right vineyard for it rather than because they think it’s popular.