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Washington State Merlot

© Eric Cook

The most famous French producers of Merlot-based wines are Le Pin, Cheval Blanc and Chateau Pétrus with prices fetching up to $1000./bottle. With no intent to encourage price increases, Washington's "Pétrus" is known as Leonetti Cellars, though cost is more like $100. on a restaurant wine list, which is about the only place for most of us to find a taste! Gary Figgins of Leonetti Cellars looks for something special from WA Merlot. "I look for that beautiful fruit, the flowery nose you can get from our Merlot," he says. "It's so grapey, so opulent, so 'in your face'." As a technique, he limits the juice's exposure with the broken skins to a few days before fermentation and presses the wines off the skins before fermentation is finished. He feels that this helps avoid the solvent action that rising alcohol has on extracting harsh tannins from the skins and therefore the resulting "bite" that accompanies it (like leaving a teabag to steep too long). On the other hand, other winemakers soak their merlot skins for a week to 10 days AFTER the wine has fermented dry to extract as much age-able flavor as possible!

From Australia and New Zealand to Washington State to South Africa to California to Chile and Argentina, merlot has secured itself as the most marketable, easy-drinking red wine grape to grow. Consumers love the drinkability and versatility of the wines, vintners love the malleability of the wines to different winemaking techniques, and growers like the large yields the vines can produce before there is a drastic drop in quality. As a grape variety, merlot in France doesn't hold a sulfur candle to the popularity of the grape in the New World and the disparity of these three locations offers insight into just how adaptable this variety is in the vineyard.

Winemakers take this adaptability and turn it to their advantage. They are already beginning with a very flavorful and silky textured wine that they can make to light, medium or heavy styles. In essence, they can put their winery's "signature" on the wine by dint of different yeast strains, new oak barrels, barrel aging, different racking procedures and bottle aging. Merlot grapes naturally make a quaffable red wine to enjoy everyday, but it can be made to show more complexity, possessing a range of flavors from its characteristic black cherry to other dark 'briary' fruits. There are also the secondary flavors that the wine will absorb as a result of its oak aging and vinification such as: vanillin, dark spice, tooled leather, roasted nuts or caramel.

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