Thomas Haden Church’s character, frustrated and looking to get laid, tells Paul Giamatti’s character that if the two women they’re about to meet want to drink Merlot, they’re all drinking Merlot. “No, if anyone orders Merlot, I’m leaving,” Giamatti responds. “I am not drinking any fucking Merlot!”

The scene is humorous but fleeting, yet after the movie Sideways was met with both critical and popular success, news organizations began reporting Merlot’s demise. Sales within the industry dropped as casual, uninformed wine drinkers turned up their noses at the drink. And wine afficionados weren’t all sad to see the grape’s downfall.

“In the previous decade, cheap Merlot had become the red wine of choice for many folks who wanted something easy to drink,” said Alder Yarrow. “If it was 1992 and you were putting on an opening at an art gallery and you wanted to serve wine, it would have been Chardonnay and Merlot. So I guess some shallow wine lovers might have decided over time that such common affinity was a turn-off.”

Yarrow, 33, writes for Vinography.com, a wine review website that receives over 10,000 unique visitors a day. In addition to his thoughts on wine, he offers sake reviews, restaurant reviews and notes on food. He lives in California with his wife and runs a consulting firm by day.
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The wine lover said that though there were anecdotal stories of diminishing Merlot sales, he didn’t know of any wineries that went out of business. There was an immediate media counter offensive against the movie, pointing out that the wine loved by the main character has a significant percentage of Merlot in it. Paloma Vineyards and Swanson Vineyards, both of which specialize in Merlot, sponsored a Merlot publicity tour to overturn the public conception.

What surprised Yarrow was that such a simple, short-lasting scene could have such direct repercussions.

“I never would have guessed the movie would have had such an effect on the U.S. wine industry. Not in a million years,” he said. “Mostly because Americans famously drink so little wine and because I didn’t think that there was a huge overlap between serious wine drinkers and the general Hollywood moviegoing public. I was clearly very wrong.”

But Mary Baker, owner of Dover Canyon Winery, thought that not all movie viewers came away from Sideways with a bad taste for Merlot.

“[I]n the movie, Miles (Giamatti’s character) isn’t really protesting about Merlot, the grape. What he’s protesting against is the tooty-fruity, bland Merlot styles that are often found on restaurant wine lists,” Baker said. “There’s also a misconception, among men mostly, that women prefer white wine and Merlots. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Women, as Miles was about to find out, like gentle men and strong wines…you didn’t hear Miles complaining once he was captivated by two stunning, assertive, wine-savvy women. There are a lot of layers of humor in both the book and the movie.”

Dover Canyon is located on the west side of Paso Robles. Baker and her co-owner, Dan Panico, worked for large wineries before opening their own place that produces limited productions from small, elite vineyards. They have limited editions of mountain-grown Merlot, and she said that their sales weren’t affected at all.

“It’s interesting that no one wants to be the ‘geeky Miles,’” she explained. “Miles apparently hated Merlot, and that made people curious about Merlot because no one wants to come across as such a navel-lint-gazing wine snob. But Miles adored Pinot Noir, (and who wouldn’t after Maia’s beautiful speech?) and so people want to be cool . . . they want to be into Pinot Noir.”
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California isn’t the only place where the grape is widely grown. It’s also planted in both France and Italy, among other places. Andrew Barrow, a UK resident who writes for Spittoon, a wine blog that receives 2,000 visitors a day, said that the film didn’t influence oversees Merlot sales.

“We have the most extensive wine range available in the world in the UK but Sideways was viewed as little more than a fun film,” he said. “A good film but insignificant to the world’s wine centre in terms of influence on sales.”

Of course, Merlot isn’t much of a UK wine, but there hasn’t been any significant evidence that Sideways was able to cross over the language barrier enough to negatively affect wine sales in France and Italy.

In addition to the Merlot offensive, many wineries in the US found other ways to adapt to changing popular tastes.

“I know of one good Merlot vineyard that grafted over to other varietals,” said Jeff Stai. “But I couldn’t even tell you if it was a direct reaction or multiple factors.”

Stai owns Twisted Oak Winery, which is located in Calaveras County, CA, what he likes to call “the best wine region you’ve never heard of.” His winery doesn’t make Merlot, so most his commentary was anecdotal, but he asserted that the movie had its positive effects.

“If the movie had an effect, it got people thinking about alternatives to Merlot – which is good for people making Tempranillo!” Stai said. “But maybe even more importantly it brought wine back into popular culture again, and that will help us all, even the Merlot producers.”

But, in the end, the question remains: Will Merlot sales ever recover? Sideways debuted in 2004, surely the bad PR ripples must have subsided.

“American consumers are a fickle lot, but I would say that Merlot did not suffer so much in sales that any wineries went out of business,” said Fredric Koeppel, who wrote a national weekly print wine column for The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis and the Scripps Howard News Service from 1984 to 2004. “The proper response to Sideways would have been to make better, more distinctive Merlot and Pinot Noir, but, honestly, I don’t know of any producers that got into a snit because of the Sideways situation; trends come and go.”

Most wine experts seemed to agree with this opinion.

“If every time a cheap version of a varietal got popular in the US, we scorned the grape completely, we’d all be drinking Mourvedre,” said Yarrow, the Vinography writer. “Which, come to think of it wouldn’t be that bad.”

Red wine might put a cork on the formation of brain proteins tied to Alzheimer’s disease, a new study shows.

But don’t raise your wine glass to celebrate yet. The study only included mice. It’s too soon to know if the findings apply to people.

Still, the data deserves further study and support the theory that one daily drink of red wine for women and two for men “may help reduce” Alzheimer’s risk, write the researchers.

Ok, so it has only been tested on mice. But at least now you know how to prevent Alzheimer’s with your pets: pour red wine into their water bowl every night.

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He theorizes the wizard works by creating a magnetic field that changes the shape of a wine’s tannins, making them larger and softer. Tannins are astringent components from grape skin and seeds, and in some cases oak, that give structure to a wine but can make it taste bitter. Bottle aging can mellow out the tannins as can decanting hours before drinking; the Bev Wizard is a shortcut, says Farrell.

Of course, who is to know if this invention is just another form of the Emperor’s New Clothes?

This link has more on how it works:

He came up with a molded plastic device that looks like a regular non-drip pourer and has an air hole to speed up oxygenation. That intensifies the effect of the wizard and differentiates it from other magnetic devices on the market such as the Wine Clip, which clasps around the bottle neck, said Farrell.

I couldn’t find any actual quotes from people who had tasted the wine and reported any difference. We shall see.

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Anyway, there’s an article whining (no pun intended) about how 2-buck chuck is hurting the wine industry:

WINE selling for just $2 a bottle has been greeted with cheers by drinkers, who happily deride it as “two-buck chuck”. But winemakers and grape growers say such steep discounts are pushing them to the wall.

Woolworths sent shockwaves through the industry last week with special offers of unlabelled, or “cleanskin”, wines selling at less than $2 a bottle at its Dan Murphy’s and BWS liquor outlets.

Dan Murphy’s national merchandise manager, Steve Donohue, said the discounted chardonnay and cabernet merlot, normally sold labelled for $6, met huge demand during the offer.

Mr Donohue said the offer was only possible because the supplier was desperate to offload the wine, even at a loss. “We weren’t exactly cleaning up on it either,” he said.

The move was reminiscent of the “two-buck chuck” wines in the US in 2003, when a glut of Californian grapes led to steep discounting.

But what the article doesn’t tell you is that the reason that 2-buck chuck is even possible is because of the wine industry’s greed. They created a wine boom in the 90s, and then when it died out, they had all these left-over grapes and nothing to do with them.

So go down to your local Trader Joe’s (the only place you can buy 2-buck chuck) and buy yourself a whole case. Every time we go down there, we stock up on several.

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Europe’s wine industry faces sweeping changes over the next few years as producers are offered big cash incentives to dig up their vines and finally drain the EU’s lakes of surplus wine.

Apart from fending off competition from New World wines by focusing more on quality than quantity, the idea is to divert subsidies to discourage unwanted surpluses that usually end up being distilled into industrial alcohol or biofuel.

Yummm. Lakes of wine.

But not to fear, despite the over-abundance of wine in Europe, French wine is as expensive as ever:

The news hasn’t sunk in yet. French wine amateurs seem still oblivious. All they have been talking about these past few days is the extraordinary prices reached by 2005 primeur Bordeaux wines: ‘€350 euros for a bottle of Lafite Rothschild. Since Robert Parker came three months ago and gave unprecedented marks, such as 99/100, prices have gone through the ceiling,’ says Jean-Louis, un amoureux du Bordeaux, half-worried, half-ecstatic. When I ask him whether he has heard of Mariann Fischer Boel, the EU commissioner for agriculture, and her wine reform, he replies: ‘No; should I know about it?’ Well, he might want to have a look at it. Her recommendations, if implemented, could change the face of the European wine industry for ever. I doubt she has realised the import of what she has set in motion.

I don’t know what this all means for the casual red wine drinker like you or me. Will prices go up or down? It says nothing about Australia, which produces the wine I buy most often: Yellow Tail.

But, what’s this? Are they actually going to simplify the wine categories? Not if the wine snobs can have their way!

My words are met with silence. Is he having a heart attack? A flow of furious invectives follows: ‘But this is insane! It will never happen; we’ll never accept it. What a preposterous idea. Wines are made of different kinds of grapes, rarely just one. What matters is where it comes from and who produced it. I would never dream of offering my guests a glass of cabernet sauvignon; it doesn’t mean anything. If I ask, “Would you like a glass of Chateau Pape Clement?”, they straight away know what I’m talking about. Simplify labelling? Bordeaux wines have the simplest labelling system in the world! There are 11,600 chateaux in Bordeaux and each produces one kind of wine: you like it or you don’t. Easy, non?’

Well, I guess I am slightly engaging in hypocrisy: I do feel kind of sophisticated whenever I drink red wine. I even turn up my nose to boxed wine. Maybe I should start speaking in an elitist French accent after all.

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Having thrown all that over for artisanal winemaking, and limited production, vineyard designate wines, we can now proudly state that we are a microwinery—with a microbudget.

In addition to my winery and marketing duties, I occasionally help Dan on the crush pad and in the vineyard. When I’m not dressed in farmer fatigues and rubber boots, I enjoy lecturing on wine appreciation and food-and-wine pairing. In my spare time, I am working on my second cookbook, a collection of essays, a novel, and a pilot for a cable television cooking show.

Our winery blog is a way for us to connect on a personal level with our customers and fans. When I visit our local farmer’s market I enjoy talking with the vendors and learning about their families, their farms, their passions. It makes dinner more enjoyable to know something about the people that grew the food on our table, and I think people feel the same way about wine.

Simon Owens: As a small winery, where do most of your wine sales come from? People visiting your winery on wine-tasting trips?

MB: We sell about sixty percent of our wine production directly to the public and to our private wine club. We sell another forty percent to select restaurants and retailers throughout California, and on a very selective basis in Florida, Colorado, and the Carolinas. We are only open to the public four days a week, and we are in a comparatively remote area—by choice. At one point we were leasing a tasting facility near the heavily traveled Highway 46 West in Paso Robles, but we decided to open our vineyard and home location to the public instead, and limit the number of hours we are open. Exactly as we predicted, the number of visitors dropped dramatically, but those people who do find us and visit are serious about evaluating our wines. We are also able to spend more time interacting with our visitors, and I think this gives them a better sense of who we are. When they visit our farm, they can dally on the swing under the 100-year-old black walnut, look at the vines, and throw balls for our springer spaniel. We are also a certified wildlife habitat, surrounded by very rugged oak and bay-studded hills, and pastured ridges. Our visitors and customers come to know us as people, and remember us in our working environment. It builds a lot of loyalty, and that’s important to us. Our customers are our best ambassadors.

SO: How easy is it to differentiate between good and bad wine? Does it reach a certain point when the quality gets so good that it’s impossible to rank one wine above the other?

MB: Even winemakers and wine writers disagree on that! As you learn more about wine, you will learn to recognize and avoid some of the most basic flaws. You’ll also learn more about concepts like balance between the fruit, oak, tannins, and acid. After that, one’s enjoyment of wine becomes very, very subjective. Some people prefer certain varieties, like pinot noir or cabernet; some are fans of certain regions of the world; others prefer a style—like fat, succulent and dark; or gentler and more nuanced, with a crisp acidity that goes well with food.

And yes, I do think that at a certain point, the fusion between a vineyard and a winemaker is as good as any wine can get. If you care to spend $900 for a bottle of Domaine de la Romanee Conti, is it worth $900? Certainly no other wines in the world taste exactly like DRC, but is every other wine inferior because it costs less? No. DRC commands these prices because they can. And the more something costs, or the rarer it is, the more a certain set of people desire it. Is a wine consumer less sophisticated because he or she chooses to spend $30-$60 on a bottle of red wine, instead of $400 a bottle for a cult California cabernet? Definitely not.

Personally, I think cult collectors are unimaginative. It’s the adventurous guy (or gal) who stashes away the as-yet-unknown winemaker productions for cellaring, and can pull them out fifteen years later when the winery is well known who can really gloat.

For those thinking about starting a wine collection, I suggest starting with pleasant, easy-drinking, and affordable wines from a wide range of grape varieties and global regions. Be an armchair traveler. Learn about the wines and the regions they came from. You can learn a lot of fascinating geography, history, political science, and romantic intrigue that way. When you identify a favorite, buy a few extra bottles, but continue to explore. As your tastes mature, push yourself to buy some slightly more expensive, cellar-worthy bottles. Buy at least six bottles of something you wish to cellar, and open a bottle every year or two. This is the only way to learn how wines mature. (Wines and women mature, by the way, they never age.) You’ll begin to see that many fleshy, alluring young things become flabby as they age mature, but quite often the awkward, somewhat sharp selections become more interesting with age maturity. This is because red wines require acidity as well as tannins to preserve the fruit flavors of the grape.

As an analogy, everyone loves a sweet, ripe strawberry or plum, but when they get too ripe they taste mushy and flat. Without a little acidity, fruit does not have that fresh, just-stolen-from-the-tree flavor. The best jams and preserves depend on acidity to preserve that summery experience. Without some acidity, cellared wines simply turn to dust in the bottle. So a young red that tastes a little one-dimensional and sharp in its youth may become quite beautiful as it matures. But only personal experience will teach you your preferences and timing. (It helps to get your friends involved in wine as well, because then you can help them evaluate their older bottles.)

SO: After the movie Sideways came out, there seemed to be a backlash against drinking Merlot. Do you think Merlot is an inferior red wine?

MB: I think the backlash is pretty superficial actually, occurring among people who don’t really purchase wine regularly, or who have not yet embraced the thrill of variety. I’d say half of our customers eschew merlot (and probably would anyway), and half taste merlot out of contrarian curiosity because of the movie. (Those who were negatively influenced by the movie are obviously unaware of the inside joke—that Miles’ cherished bottle of 1961 Cheval Blanc is a blend of merlot and cabernet franc!)

Merlot is definitely not an inferior variety, but in its most elegant expressions it can be a somewhat austere, prim, yet voluptuously plummy wine that needs softening, like a beautiful and overlooked spinster.

Many Americans tend to gravitate toward wines with a distinctive, recognizable character, like the cherry/cinnamon/stone profile of cabernets, or the strong raspberry/peppercorn of zinfandels, or the blueberry/smoke/licorice profile of syrahs. By comparison, a merlot needs more study to recognize its finer qualities. It’s also unfortunate that many wineries treat merlot as a simple table wine, and are guilty of producing thin, cloyingly sweet, or acidic and one-dimensional versions.

SO: What are the five blogs everyone should be reading (besides your own)?

MB: Fermentation
An Obsession with Food
Cincinnati Wine Warehouse
Grape Radio
LennDevours

You can find Mary’s blog over here