In 2004, a single line of movie dialogue did what no harvest failure or market crash could: it nearly killed an entire category. After Sideways, Merlot became shorthand for everything unsophisticated about American wine culture, and the industry largely obliged. Twenty years later, serious producers are making the counterargument. At Sullivan Rutherford Estate in Napa, winemaker Jeff Cole makes it one blind tasting at a time.
Three anonymous glasses of 2018 Merlot sit on the table — one from Bordeaux’s Pomerol, one from Tuscany’s Bolgheri, one from the vineyards at Rutherford Estate. He doesn’t say which is which. But his point is profound: Merlot should be evaluated among the places where it has long been iconic. No speech about “saving” the grape, no apology for a category that lost its footing. Instead, Cole asks tasters to start where most arguments about wine should: with what’s in the glass. Only after they’ve talked about structure, fruit, and tannin does he reveal the labels.
What Cole is really doing is reminding people that America’s complicated relationship with Merlot is largely America’s problem. Elsewhere, the grape has never needed rehabilitation.
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In Pomerol, Pétrus is planted entirely to Merlot on a plateau of blue clay. It has long been considered one of the most profound wines on earth: silky, layered, almost otherworldly in concentration. Across the Right Bank, Château Angélus and Château Cheval Blanc have built their identities around Merlot-dominant blends of remarkable depth and aging potential. And in Italy’s Bolgheri, Merlot and Masseto have become essentially synonymous: a 100% Merlot bottling that commands prices rivaling Bordeaux’s finest and helped define the Super-Tuscan category on the world stage.
Perhaps the most telling signal that Merlot’s moment is arriving again comes from an unexpected direction. Even the Cabernet-centric estates of Bordeaux’s Left Bank — long standard-bearers for Cabernet Sauvignon — are now turning their attention to the grape.
Château Lafite Rothschild, the first growth whose Pauillac terroir is synonymous with Cabernet dominance, quietly introduced Anseillan with the 2018 vintage: a Merlot-dominant blend and the house’s first entirely new wine in more than a century. Meanwhile, at Château Lascombes in Margaux, director Axel Heinz — who spent more than fifteen years building Masseto into one of Italy’s most revered bottles — arrived in 2023 and quickly isolated a single block of 60-year-old Merlot to produce La Côte Lascombes, a 100% Merlot bottling launched with the 2022 vintage and priced above the estate’s grand vin. That the man who spent nearly two decades overseeing Bolgheri’s most celebrated Merlot has brought that same conviction to the Left Bank is no coincidence. It is, as Cole might put it, a palate-training exercise on a global scale.
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