International Merlot Day

History

The origin of this observance is not well documented. No founding body, trade group or first observance can be traced to an acceptable source; the November 7 date is carried by daily-holiday aggregators and wine-marketing pages, neither of which establishes anything.

Merlot's own history is better recorded, and younger than most people assume. The grape's parentage was an open question until 2009, when J-M. Boursiquot, T. Lacombe, V. Laucou and colleagues published "Parentage of Merlot and related winegrape cultivars of southwestern France: discovery of the missing link" in the Australian Journal of Grape and Wine Research. They identified Merlot as a cross between Cabernet Franc and a previously unknown cultivar they named Magdeleine Noire des Charentes. The first cuttings of that second parent were found in Brittany, in northwestern France, where no vineyard exists today — though vines are known to have grown there between 1460 and 1477.

The same work reshuffled several family trees. Magdeleine Noire des Charentes turned out to be a parent of Malbec, also called Cot, with Prunelard as the other parent, and of two obscure cultivars, Guignard de Saintours and Mourtès. Cabernet Franc may also be a parent of Carmenère — the variety that was long grown in Chile under the belief that it was Merlot, and which the authors confirmed is a distinct cultivar. As for the name, the research summary is direct: "The origin of Merlot seems relatively recent, as its name is only seen in the literature for the first time at the end of the 18th century, just before the French Revolution."

In the United States, Merlot has one well-studied commercial inflection. Steven S. Cuellar, Dan Karnowsky and Frederick Acosta tested whether the 2004 film Sideways, in which the protagonist disparages the grape by name, changed what Americans bought. Examining U.S. wine sales from 1999 to 2008 in the Journal of Wine Economics, they found "relative growth of Pinot Noir and a stagnant and even declining growth in case volume of Merlot since 2004," describing the changes in growth rates as small but statistically significant. They were careful not to credit the film outright: a correlation in the sales data is not the same as a cause on the screen.

How to observe

Drink Merlot next to its parent. Cabernet Franc is widely available and the comparison is the whole point of the 2009 paper — you are tasting one generation against the next. If you can find a Chilean Carmenère, add it: for decades it was sold as Merlot, and the mistake is easier to understand with all three glasses in front of you.

Check what is actually in the bottle. Under Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau rules at 27 CFR 4.23(b), a wine labeled with a single grape variety must derive at least 75 percent of its volume from that variety, all of it grown in the labeled appellation of origin. A bottle labeled Merlot can legally be a quarter something else, and in Bordeaux-style blending that is often exactly the intent rather than a shortcut.