Corey Pierce

The subject of wine has always carried a certain amount of mystique. Perhaps because the subject is so dynamic and the material so vast, that no one person has the wherewithal to grasp it in its entirety. This in turn proliferates the passing of misinformation and half-truths that can lead to some pretty interesting and unusual practices. One that seems to be prominent with certain wine enthusiasts today is the idea that single varietal wines are somehow superior to those that contain a blend of grapes. This theory holds that a wine labelled “Cabernet Sauvignon” will be superior to one labelled “Cabernet Sauvignon-Merlot-Syrah.” The idea being that these latter grapes are added in an attempt to dilute the wine, leaving the consumer with an innately inferior product. Is this really true?

The short answer is no, but as with most things concerning wine, there is no simple answer. A more accurate answer is, sometimes, but rarely anymore. The antiquated idea of illicit blending practices conjures images of 19th century merchants perched over immense vats, adding gallons of shoddy juice, sullying an otherwise pristine wine in an effort to stretch their dollar and feed their insatiable greed.

The truth is that, while fraudulent activity did, and does, occasionally occur in the wine business, blending is done more often to improve the quality of a wine than to pull a fast one. In fact, the stories we hear of Bordeaux merchants bringing barges of wine up from the south to blend with their famed Châteaux bottlings was done in an effort to add body and substance to an otherwise underripe wine from a weak vintage.

Today there are laws protecting you from this sort of fraudulent practice because, despite a winemaker’s best intentions, people want to preserve the pedigree of what they are drinking. Which leads us to another important question concerning blending: can blending various grapes from different sites produce better wine? Here again, we have two answers to what seems like a simple question. The first is absolutely yes. For instance, if you have a lot of Grenache that is perfumed and delicious but lacks for body and structure, why not add some Syrah or mourvèdre to round out the missing pieces. This is common practice in the south of France to produce one of the world’s most consistent and reliable wines — Côtes-du-Rhône. The line gets a little more blurry, however, when we enter a more revered region such as Burgundy. It may be true that adding some Syrah to a weak vintage of Chambertin would improve the wine, but then it would no longer be Chambertin — a wine that, by law, must be 100 per cent Pinot Noir and come only from this specific vineyard site.

So when is blending OK, and when is it not? Blending is best when it’s done in an effort to improve a deficiency in a wine without compromising the pedigree. In some cases, we buy wine to experience the expression of a particular place, such as a vineyard in Volnay, Napa or Barolo, and to add fruit grown outside of that vineyard would be to mislead the consumer. These represent a very small amount of the wine we consume. The vast majority of wine made today will constitute a blend of some type or another, whether it be different vineyard sites or various grape varieties.

The blended wine is not something you need to fear; rather it is the art of the winemaker at work. When any finished wine is assembled, the various lots are tasted, blended and re-blended until the winemaker is happy — and that is true with nearly every wine made. So if you don’t like the idea of blends, then how about a cuvée? The French have a great word for everything.