Vellum Wine Cellars Red

Vellum Wine Cellars Red (it’s Merlot)

I’ve shipped Vellum’s Cabernet Sauvignon before, so if you want a write up on them and why I feel a connection to the project see:

Vellum Wine Craft Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 2011

This time though, I want to talk about Merlot. Look, it says something that when a wine is almost all Merlot that a small, start up winery decided to call it a “Red”. While there’s a long term thought process that might lead a winery to call something by a trade name instead of by a varietal name which I’d classify as the following “good” reasons:

• Merlot becomes harder to source as more of it is pulled out for even more Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard space in Napa. More on the death of Merlot in a minute.
• There is a bad vintage of Merlot, so you use less than the required 75% of that varietal to have it listed on the label. Having a Merlot in most years and then a “Red” in others, likely kills sales. It definitely pisses off retail stores.
• Merlot’s increasingly hard to sell to institutional buyers and consumers alike. Again, more on the death of Merlot coming up.

So we have a Merlot that’s labeled under a trade name and quite honestly, that’s quite ok. I think for a winery making only 4 wines at most, having an easy way to identify a style makes some sense. Vellum has a white, a Cabernet and a Red and Black. Really, they’re trying to explain exactly the style of each wine. Cabernet is the given, the breadwinner. The white makes sense to everyone. Then you’re talking about red and black, one rounder and the other deeper and darker.

Really though, in large part what we’re talking about here at it’s core is the NEED of a small winery to find a way to sell a varietal, that vintners really thought they could hang their hats on for while. Here’s the problem for Merlot:

Before anyone asks, I didn’t cherry pick dates here, this is the entirety of available statistics for Merlot tonnage crushed in California. The California Wine Institute continues to be the only reliable source for this type of data and I’m thankful they share it publicly, for free.

As you can see the biggest issue for Merlot is that pretty much no new Merlot has been planted, or harvested since 2000. Given that amount of new plantings happening in the state, that’s borderline shocking. Plus, the average price per ton for the varietal has decreased as well.

If you’re wondering where that tonnage is going, you can probably guess without my help, but here you go anyway:

Unlike Merlot, you can see the dramatic step forward in recent Pinot Noir tonnage. There’s a combination at play of people moving toward the varietal outright as well as, moving toward regions which grow the varietal well like both the Sonoma Coast as well as the California Central Coast where a lot of this extra tonnage is housed. As an aside, that’s been one part about the rise of Pinot Noir that’s been hard for California winemakers and large corporations to deal with. Since the inception of the wine industry in my state, cheap wine has been made in the hot inland valleys. For Merlot that’s not a great spot, the wine’s even when judged on a $4 average price point for the regions, are awful. Cabernet holds up well though, helping to move consumers up the price spectrum over time. For Pinot, it’s a non starter as the wines end up little better than vinegar. So, the industry has needed to find spots with both cheap wine and water, as well as enough sunshine to ripen the grapes, but not too much. If you drive the 101 from Los Angeles to San Francisco, you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Ok, so you’re saying, of course, it’s Pinot Noir. Thank Sideways if you want and I have in this space in the past, but there’s a few other things going on as well.

First and foremost, there is that old adage that you are only suppose to plant the varietal that barely gets ripe in your vineyard. That’s almost never Merlot in California, so you end up with a wine, or really a group of wines, without any edge at all. That’s not a great thing. People are increasingly moving away from the varietal.

Secondly, Merlot is increasingly being strangled by Cabernet Sauvignon. There was a time when the folks in Napa thought (really, they did) that they’d end up much like Bordeaux in that part of the valley would be based on Merlot and part of Cabernet. Clearly, that hasn’t happened. I challenge you to find a vineyard planted in the past 15 years where the absolute best spaces were given to Merlot. In the past 10 years, you might not even find a vineyard that was planted with more than a row or two of Merlot at all. Sure, some winemakers like to have a bit around for blending, but increasingly that isn’t even happening.
There’s a rap song about the death of a dynasty and I know a few folks who feel that way about Merlot. There was a time when Merlot and Chardonnay were going to be the big stars in California wine, forever. Chardonnay despite attempts in some quarters to change this, is still the leading white wine by several standard deviations. But my gosh, Merlot barely has a seat at the table any longer.

Longer term, there’s a select few spots within the state that seem especially suited to grow the grape. Vellum’s Red comes from their Coombsville vineyard, where the grape actually does struggle to ripen. I’ve talked about Coombsville before, but it might be Merlot’s last and best hope to keep a foothold in Napa Valley. I don’t mind Washington State beginning to dominate the domestic Merlot market, but I know it still makes a number of folks within the California wine industry nervous: what happens if the Pinot Noir love affair in America is little more than a fad? Can’t we try and find space for Merlot?

Vellum’s Red is showing up in both of our high end wine clubs this month and I hope you enjoy it. It’s truly one of the last expressions of Merlot available from high quality vineyards in the state.