What does this have to do with wine? The same way that Americans inherently feel purebred dogs are of a higher quality ever pay $1,000 for a mutt? or take one to a dog show? Americans are stuck on purebred wines. We drink merlot. We drink chardonnay. We drink white zinfandel. But there s a ton of blended wines just waiting to nuzzle you with their wet noses, and they ve got enough well-heeled cousins that they really should not be called mutts.
Take, for example, some of the most famous and expensive wines in the world: French Bordeaux. Almost all of them are blends of cabernet sauvignon, merlot and cabernet franc. Where in Bordeaux the wine is from determines what the blend is. It doesn t matter if the wine is dominated by cabernet sauvignon grapes or merlot grapes or any other combination of grapes grown in the Bordeaux region of France. What you end up with is a wine called Bordeaux.
You almost never see the grapes that are in the bottle, especially on the front label, unless a French wine producer has really Americanized his or her wine. Bordeaux isn t the only well-known mix. One of our favorite dessert wines, port, is traditionally a blend of five different Portuguese grapes. Taking just one grape and making a wine out of it wouldn t make port. It s the blending of the grapes that turns it into a special wine that can age for decades.
A wine we used to consider our house white is St. Julian Blue Heron. It is a blend of Vidal Blanc, Seyval Blanc and Riesling, and it s yummy. Those three grapes can also be delicious on their own, but alone, they aren t Blue Heron. Recently, we opened a bottle of Marietta Cellars Old Vine Red, which is a blend of Zinfandel, Petite Sirah and Carignane, plus small amounts of Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah.