By Thierry Boeuf in The Tribune (December 19, 2000)

 

Grapes offer wine variety

 

 

Behind the country or region, another source of wine diversity comes from the grape it is made.

Personally, I get very tired of hearing about the same grapes all the time. The marketing approach of the new wine producing countries has made the names of Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet-Sauvignon and some other grapes a household name. I agree that many good wines are made from these grapes, but with so many other good varieties available, it is a pity to limit our choice to such a short list.

In Europe, wines first of all have to respect certain legal guidelines to qualify as such, but even with these restrictions in place, in France alone, about 100 different varieties of grape vine exist. I suppose the Spanish and Italian neighbors are just the same, much like the other old wine producing countries such as Greece and Portugal, which have many other types to offer wine lovers.

In Spain, the first grape variety is Garnacha (Grenache in English), which is capable of concentrating a lot of sugar making for very alcoholic wines. It is also used in the south of France in the Rhone valley, Provence, Languedoc and as far as Rivesaltes and Banyuls.

In these last two Appellations for example, the alcohol content easily reaches 16 per cent, and it is only due to the inability of yeast to survive in higher alcohol content that prevents it from going higher, because you often still have between 1 per cent and 3 per cent more in potential alcohol, which is sugar not fermented. This type of wine is usually drunk as an aperitif, with blue cheese or desserts such as the Port wine.

The Tempranillo grape, along with the Grenache, are the best-known Spanish varieties because they have both been introduced in new producing regions, such as California and Chile.  The Trebbiano, which is also grown in the new producing countries, is a white grape originally from Italy but has been used in France for a long time, either for simple dry wines in Provence or for the wine distilled to make Cognac.

Beside this diversity of wines due to the grapes, you should be aware that many wines are traditionally made of a blend of several varieties of grapes. For example, the wines from the Côtes-du-Rhône region in France are made from up to 10 different kinds of grapes. Now, the new producing countries have created some very good blends, such as the Cabernet Sauvignon-Shiraz, which is an Australian creation, I think.

Why do I call it a creation? Because the Cabernet Sauvignon is a grape from the south west of France, namely the Bordeaux region, while the Shiraz is a grape from Côtes-du-Rhône, which is in the southeast.

 Therefore, traditionally in France, we dont have this blend so they had to travel all the way to Australia to meet each other and get married for the pleasure of our papillae.

But back to what I would call the celebrity grapes, which are grown everywhere nowadays, and, I would add, sometimes anywhere. Do you know where they are from?

Cabernet-Sauvignon is a grape, as written above, which was originally selected and created in the west of France, where it is still largely used in Bordeaux, Bergerac and other Appellations from the south-west and in the Loire valley.

The Merlot comes from the same area, though it is perhaps a bit more southern. The funny thing is that most French people didnt even know the name of these varieties until recently, because they did not buy wine labeled Cabernet-Sauvignon or Merlot, since these were instead known as Appellations like Bordeaux, Médoc or Touraine.

 The reason for this, is that European people are more accustomed to calling the wines by their region of origin, and it is only with the recent creation of the southern Vins de Pays dOc that the wines called by grape names has been introduced in France.

Having said this, I would not be surprised if a number of people now thought that Cabernet-Sauvignon has nothing to do with Bordeaux, even if most of the red wines from there are made with more than 50 per cent of it (but you still have to remember that to respect the law, none of them is pure Cabernet-Sauvignon). The rules of Appellations is in itself a story long enough to be developed another day.

As for the other celebrities, I will simply say that the Pinot noir is originally from the north east of France, where it is used in the red wines of Burgundy, Alsace and Jura, as well as being a part of many sparkling wines of Champagne- even the white Champagne. The Chardonnay is from the same area as Pinot noir while the Shiraz- known as Syrah in French- is coming from the north of the Côtes-du-Rhône appellation, close to the city of Lyon.

All these grapes have some ancestors in common. More than two thousands years ago, these traveled from Greece in the ships of the first merchants and settlers who begun growing vines in France, starting in Provence where the cities of Nice and Marseille now are. The grapes they imported at the time were crossed with those from the wild vines, which naturally grew in the French forests.

The laborious work of selection done by generations of grape-growers in each and every region led to the large number of varieties available today.

Unfortunately this number is more limited than a century and half ago, when several diseases arrived from the US and killed all the wild vines, devastating most of the European vineyards. The progress made in science now gives us the possibility of not only saving some endangered varieties, but also allowing us to create new ones, which should give us some new sources of pleasure.