It may be a surprise to some observers who imagine that Cabernet Sauvignon is pre-eminently the grape used for the best wines of Bordeaux that Merlot is the variety that gives rise to some 70% of the wines that are made in Bordeaux today. The following piece looks at the question of how a particular grape gets to be relied upon to the exclusion of others that may have been used in the past.

Why is it so?

Why does France have only a fraction of the 2000 varieties that appear to be native to Italy? Is it due to the acquisitive habits of the Romans who forged an empire 2000 years before the French. Is the prestige of Bordeaux related to its use of cabernet sauvignon? Is the Australian wine industry likely to be as dependent on cabernet and shiraz in the future as it is today. How long have the Bordelaise been growing the varieties that we think of as their own, and have they been doing so in the same places in the same proportion as they are today? What is the role of Merlot in Bordeaux and is that changing? Answers to these questions depend upon speculation based upon observation, a knowledge of history, the habits of mankind, and the processes likely to have been at work in peasant based subsistence agriculture versus merchant driven commercial operations of larger scale.

The grape varieties used in Bordeaux, namely merlot, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, malbec, sauvignon blanc and semillon, share a flavour characteristic manifesting as herbaceous, vegetal, capsicum, and green bean. Recent investigation of the DNA profile of Cabernet Sauvignon reveals that its parents are probably Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Franc. There are physical and flavour similarities in the Bordeaux varieties that suggest Sauvignon Blanc or a vine like Sauvignon may be a parent to them all. These are: close nodes, most nodes deliver a shoot, tendency to denseness in the leaf layers, leaf persistence in autumn and a high degree of cluster shading which relates to retention of green flavours at maturity. Along with the green flavour, in the right circumstances there can be lots of ripe berry flavours. A wine of vigorous and spirited character can be produced. In unfavourable circumstances the wine may be simply green and firm. Over the centuries the Bordelaise have learned that they get the best out of these varieties in their climate when the soils are well drained, the vine is starved of moisture at the end of the season, the leaves are on the turn on harvest day, and if nature doesn't provide these circumstances you must pull the leaves out of the fruit zone prior to or soon after verasion. If you doubt any of this check out
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11052741&dopt=Abstract
Or search on Google for RESEARCH ON 2-METHOXY-3-ISOBUTYLPYRAZINE IN GRAPES AND WINES and download the full PDF file.

The specialisation of Bordeaux in these varieties suggests that the Bordelaise have been happy with their varietal heritage for a long period of time, perhaps since the Romans arrived to set themselves up in Saint Emilion and have not seen the need to import new varieties. If their wine readily sold, or they were happy to drink it all themselves they would have been happy to go on planting what they had. It is a mistake to think, however that their vineyards were homogenous plantings of single varieties because they were not. White was inter-planted with red and even the reds were a fruit salad. If a vine died it was replaced with a layer from an adjacent vine. Rarely would vineyards have been torn out and replanted.

For the Bordelaise to finish up with a population of varieties similar but showing distinctive differences, some propagation from seed rather than cuttings would have been required. It takes longer for the vine to establish itself from seed but that is not a problem for an opportunist prepared to dig it up and transplant it. The growth of seedlings in a vineyard was common before herbicides became available. It is possible that, over a long period of time, a very few parents give rise to some diversity in their offspring, yet clearly showing the influence of some common genetic inheritance. The warm moist environment of Bordeaux is favourable to seed survival and propagation while arid environments are clearly not.

Better than one bunch is two

Peasant agriculturalists tend to plant the varieties they have at hand. It is only in the last 100 years or so that vines were planted in straight rows and the rows worked with horse or tractor drawn implements. Until the use of wire in very recent times, to support the sprawling growth of the vine, such an activity would be near impossible to carry out and hand hoeing would have been the customary means of weed control in vineyards. There would be little reason to plant the vines in rows and no reason at all to separate the plants in any regular and consistent fashion. Old vines died and a new one was propagated from a nearby layer, a seedling that took off by itself or another grown elsewhere from seed or cutting and transplanted.

The fact that the aforesaid varieties of vines were at hand in Bordeaux probably reflects the fact that the Bordelaise were happy enough with their performance. The fruit ripened with regularity and was desirable to birds, animals and man alike.

Educated, powerful and influential men travel more widely than the peasants and are acquisitive. They are likely to bring home a novelty, perhaps a chimpanzee, perhaps a vine cutting. Bordeaux is peripheral to Mediterranean trade routes, Rome and Venice are more central. The Moors were content to stop at the Pyrenees; Hannibal took his elephants as far as the Alps. The isolation of Bordeaux might then explain the development of a stock of cultivars, related yet different.

Commercial Viticulture

The development of trade in a commodity goes hand in hand with large-scale plantings of homogenous plant materials. The fastest method of propagating vines in new ground is via cuttings and this process reduces diversity. Whereas subsistence farming maintains diversity, cash cropping reduces it. In Bordeaux most of the wine produced was consumed locally until the wine was to find a market outside the region. The varietal mix would have changed very slowly until commercial opportunity made possible a greater scale of production. In a word, the situation is one of isolation and inbreeding. One should remember that today some sixteen thousand varieties of vine have been identified. There are two thousand in Italy alone. In Bordeaux we are talking of dozens at most.

Three hundred years ago the only really stable wines capable of maintaining a consistent and pleasant flavour over time were the very sweet wines like Madiera, Constancia and Tokay. Around the Mediterranean grapes were dehydrated prior to ferment to produce such styles. Dry wines simply went off and could not be considered as a reliable commercial item. Bordeaux produced dry wines. The climate was neither favourable to the production of high alcohol wines, nor favourable to the dehydration of grapes in the field as it is in Spain and Italy. However, Bordeaux had supplied Britain with wine from the 1400s. Ceramic serving jugs marked claret were used in London from the early 1600s. Wine was transported and decanted from wooden barrels. Glass bottles were not available until 1690. Wines could not be binned till the 1730s when parallel-sided bottles were produced for the first time. Without binning there cannot be bottle development. Bottles were much more hygienic containers than barrels. There was still the problem of uneven bottle sizing and the British government therefore banned the sale of wine in bottles until 1860. Wine was sold by measure and run into customer's own bottles. They were expensive and often stamped with the customers own mark. The consumption of wine from barrels is perforce a rapid affair. The wine maintained its character for some few months before the stock of bacteria harboured by the wood got to work and 'turned' the contents.

The commercialisation of wine in Bordeaux owed much to the Dutch who drained the Medoc in the mid 17th century. The fine wine trade depended upon the planting of the Medoc, accessible to sea going ships from Britain, bottles for binning, the creation of a wealthy merchant class in Bordeaux from about 1750 and the interest of the dominant wine traders, the Dutch, who controlled the European wine trade from about 1500 to 1700. The Dutch position at the mouth of Rhine was providential. They discovered the use of Sulphur dioxide and other useful techniques like the creation of mistelle, fortification and blending. They traded with the Bordeaux river town of Libourne adjacent to St Emilion by land and canal when the British could only access the wines of the Medoc because the Gironde was unnavigable. There was also the problem of the customs duties levied by the city on the wines from up-river.

British trade in Bordeaux wines grew fast from the 1800s with the increasing wealth of the British aristocracy and merchant classes. This helped to expand the area under cultivation in the Medoc, pushed out other crops and reduced vinous diversity to a minimum. The area devoted to vines increased and some varieties disappeared. Carminere is a case in point. Its only home today is Chile. However, large changes in varietal composition in older established vineyards only followed natural disasters like the big freeze of 1956 that wiped out most of the inland vineyards in Bordeaux. This was the time when Merlot appears to have become dominant and it did so where the freeze was worst, the inland areas. Today we are told it is being planted in the Medoc at the expense of Cabernet Sauvignon but that is because it ripens more readily.

Why is Merlot taking over? Is it frost tolerance, its ability to regularly ripen, disease avoidance, better cropping, or a flavour choice? Who knows? The trend is a result of a multitude of individual decisions. After World War two the Americans changed the wine market dramatically by driving up the price of Pomerol wines, merlot dominant, with no cabernet sauvignon in their composition at all. Were the changes driven ultimately by consumer preference?

All of the above is presented as a counter to the simplistic New World notion that Cabernet Sauvignon is, and will forever be, the king of red grape varieties. That is naive, irresponsible, marketing talk.

Three Hills Merlot
We have more merlot than anything else at Three Hills with six hectares followed by semillon with four. In the reds, cabernet, tempranillo, pinot, shiraz, grenache and malbec follow suit.
I am impressed with the ability of merlot to present sweet fruit flavour, to flesh out cabernet sauvignon, to make any blend look better and to stand alone when required. I would not say the same about cabernet.

The 2001 perspective:
The 1999 Three Hills Merlot was from the beginning a kind wine, an elegant and a fine wine. I was pleased with it. It recently took a silver medal at the Perth Show. It is still very much a baby. I find that merlot needs time in the bottle. Often as one is bottling it, the wine shows a firm tannic edge, and an herbaceous edge quite a different thing to a tannic edge, the two together providing a typical Bordeaux type astringent lift. I know that the fruit is there to overwhelm it but time in the bottle will be essential before the fruit sings. Wait for the fat lady. We anticipate a release date in late March 2002

The 2002/3 perspective: Excellent bottle development has the fruit singing and the palate complex. A lovely wine with food. In my mind the best Merlot we have ever released and we began this back in 84.

The 2004 Perspective
No Three Hills Merlot was released from the 2000 and 2001 vintages. None was released from the 2000 vintage under our own labels. The 2001 was released under the Happs Label. The wine has won silver medals in shows but no golds. However, it was selected as one of the top 30 reds under $30 across all varieties by the wine writers Huon Hooke, Peter Forrestal and Sally Marden for Australian Gourmet Traveller Wine magazine in June / July 2004. They had this to say:

'One of the best wines from a wide and often eclectic selection of grapes grown the irrepressible Erl Happ in Margaret River, this is Merlot at the more serious end of the spectrum. Thereís a heavy complex nose, with earthy savoury characters mixed in with red fruit scents. Itís a similar story in the mouth - red cherry and berry-fruit flavours bound up with seriously grippy oak tannins and fine acidity. Truly impressive depth and length. Will last for years, but great now if given plenty of air and served with grown up food.'

Current Vintage : 2003