CARMÉNÈRE

Illustration of the Carmenère grape variety by Jules Troncy in the work "Ampelography,” 1901

You may taste many things in a sip of red wine: a panoply of fruit flavors, earth or minerals, spicy wood, even the cleansing astringency of tannin.  

In a wine made from carménère, a red grape born in France but that has flowered of late in Chile, you also will taste mystery. 

Long ago, carménère was a foundational building block of red Bordeaux, alongside such worthies as cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc. After being struck down in the late 1800s by the evil plant louse phylloxera, winemakers replanting Europe’s vineyards favored other grapes over it, such as merlot (which in addition was easier to grow than carménère). 

But carménère had hitchhiked to Chile in the baggage of emigrating French winemakers, themselves fleeing phylloxera in search of greener vineyards. There, though, carménère was planted hither and yon among vines less noble than those back home and was made—as were all wines in Chile then—into a mere everyday red. 

In short order, under its own name, carménère disappeared. Worse, everyone began to call it “merlot” because it had been interplanted more often than not with merlot. And worst, when Chile’s winemaking began to expand into international markets in the early 1990s, labels that said “merlot” were a surer sale than any printed saying “carménère.” 

Only in the late 1990s did winemakers, this time visiting from France, determine that what was “merlot” throughout much of Chile in truth was carménère. In 2007, Casa Lapostolle (a French-owned winery located in Chile’s Colchagua Valley) released a wine to rave reviews, made 100 percent of old-vine carménère from its holdings in the now-famous Apalta vineyard. 

The mystery (re)solved, Chile has embraced carménère as its own “native” or “indigenous” red wine grape, adjectives you will see touting Chilean carménère. More authentically, Chilean winemakers have attacked making wine of carménère with their truly native energy and drive, locating those regions where carménère flourishes into a delicious example of red wine. 

One such person is Mario Geisse, with whom I visited one January (during Chile’s summer) while walking with him through his prized vineyard, Los Lingues, the pearl of the holdings of the winery Vina Casa Silva. From Los Lingues, Geisse fashions several wines from carménère. 

“Carménère needs a long growing season,” said Geisse, “but it especially needs soil that is extremely dry, with clay very deep in the soil, with rocks, so that the carménère roots must go way, way down at the end of summer to find water that has been trapped from earlier when the rains came.” 

“If carménère grows on a soil different than that,” added Geisse, “then the vine will not ‘shut down,’ so to speak, at the end of the season and the tannins and other phenolics in the grape will be unripe. Only if the soil stresses the vine will the tannins ripen slowly and be ‘sweet’ and mature.” 

“We have that soil at Los Lingues,” said Geisse, “plus a long season is also assured by very cold night temperatures. The grapes ripen slowly and evenly.” 

Indeed, the downsides for carménère are immature “green” tannins and phenolics (giving the wine a unwelcome vegetal character) or an over compensatory over-ripening in a too-warm climate that can make carménère taste “tarry,” or of burnt toast or prunes.  

But when it finds its place, and a winemaker handles it gently in the winery, carménère is terrifically tasty. Read this delicious description of carménère from Armand d'Armailhacq, a 19th-century proprietor and magistrate in Bordeaux’s Medoc, that I once found: “Its flavor is excellent. The taste is even better than the two cabernets; the wine it produces reflects these qualities. It is mellow, yet full and rich in body. It mixes well with [the] cabernets, to which it adds a rounder flavor. It lasts about as long, and with age, improves toward perfection.”