Poor, poor pitiful merlot?

Or maybe not: Untangling the urban myths surrounding California’s most notorious grape

Merlot is the grape everyone loves to hate. That includes a certain character in a certain movie that even people who don’t know much about wine know about (and which the Wine Curmudgeon doesn’t acknowledge). The truth, though, is more complicated – and, possibly, more interesting.

Merlot was never quite as popular as everyone remembers, and it never fell quite as far as the legend has it. That’s the subject of a story I wrote for Pix.wine, in which I found:

• Merlot, even at its height, was never more popular than cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay, and it wasn’t any more common than zinfandel. And when’s the last time you read anything about the demise of zinfandel?

• One reason for its popularity? It was easier to pronounce than cabernet sauvignon, so it was huge in restaurants in the 1990s with anyone who wanted a glass of red wine.

• Today, though it’s not nearly as popular as a varietal as it once was, it’s a key element in red blends, sweet and otherwise. And red blends have been one of the fastest growing wine categories for several years.

• Merlot was also part of Coke’s unhappy time as a big wine company in the early 1980s, when it planted the grape up and down wine country in an attempt turn it into wine’s version of a soft drink. And it may even have played a small role in the collapse of the Seagram’s liquor empire in 2002.

Photo: Pavel Danilyuk from Pexels