Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 18

Breakthrough Wines

an arresting bouquet of purple flowers, cut herbs
and conifer tips-felt on point and in proportion.
The wines were translucent in the glass, yet plump
enough in the middle to offset any herbal overtones.
Their consistency suggested that Walla Walla's growing season-its late bud break, warm summers and
extended Indian summer-dovetailed beautifully
with carmenère's late-ripening tendencies.
Of course, during all the years I'd clung to my
carmenère prejudice, Chile's viticulturists had been
changing up their growing practices, homing in
on the best sites (and ripping out the worst). Their
favored sites provided a ripening window that preserved its aromatic uniqueness while offering a depth
of flavor that makes those first bottlings seem like a
distant memory. Many of the best efforts, it turned
out, came from sites with terroir conditions similar
to those in Walla Walla.

Despite a steep learning curve, the country's carmenères improved dramatically in little more than a
decade, and by the turn of the century, carmenère
growers had reined in some of the variety's more herbaceous tendencies. Still, my bias remained more or
less entrenched. I'd hear about posh new bottlings
employing the variety, but I never felt compelled
to seek them out. Such is the nature of bias-it will
cloud your judgment long after it's lost its relevance.
So, I came to my first carmenères from the Walla
Walla Valley in the early 2010s with plenty of skepticism. These were bottlings from Seven Hills Winery,
Reininger and Beresan, mostly employing fruit from
Seven Hills Vineyard, a 200-plus-acre vineyard on the
Oregon side of the valley established in 1980, and one
of the valley's most respected fruit sources, supplying
grapes to dozens of producers.
All three of these wines were head-turners. Everything about them-the warm dark fruit set against

WINE & SPIRITS

FA L L 2 0 1 8

Carmenère's disappearance and rediscovery is one of
the more remarkable stories of forensic ampelography in the last 50 years. A grape variety with
genetic origins in Bordeaux, it was once common in
the Médoc in France, mentioned in censuses in the
Gironde as early as 1783, alongside cabernet franc.
Other texts in Bordeaux suggest that it was easily confused with cabernet franc. After the phylloxera epidemic of the late 19th century, however, carmenère
all but disappeared from France.
And almost as soon as it left Bordeaux, this variety lost its identity. It settled in Chile as "merlot," in
northeastern Italy as "cabernet franc" and in China's Shandong province as "cabernet gernischt" (the
word "gernischt," according to grape geneticist José
Vouillamoz, one of the principle authors of the opus
Wine Grapes, was almost certainly a misspelling of
gemischt, German for "mixed." But just what was one
to make of "mixed" cabernet?)
Carmenère's identity crisis first gained international attention in November 1994, when the
ampelographer Jean-Michel Boursiquot paid a visit
to Viña Carmen in the Maipo Valley. There, a former student pointed out a new planting of what she
called merlot, and he was puzzled as to why the variety's shoot tips were orange-merlot's shoots didn't
behave this way. This was during flowering, and when
Boursiquot saw the flowers' oddly twisted stamens,
he knew he was looking at carmenère, a variety he'd
only seen in plant repositories.
So, by the time carmenère revealed itself, it was a
grape variety much removed from its origins, grown
around the world by a cadre of producers with only
rudimentary notions as to its typicity, ideal flavor

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018