Merlot Resurrected

Dan Berger
Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:00:00 -0700
Lifestyle

Nine Sonoma County wine lovers gathered at a table in a Petaluma restaurant on a recent Thursday evening to pull corks on 16 different classic bottles of wine.

Included in the lineup was a bottle from 1924, another from 1961, an iconic Napa Valley cabernet, two other red wines from Bordeaux, a 40-year-old barbaresco and a 1997 German auslese for dessert.

One of the best wines in the room was an old "right bank" red made primarily from Merlot. Everyone liked it. And no one brought up the movie "Sideways." In fact, almost everyone praised the wine as absolutely superior.
Updated: Tue Mar 10, 2026

Nine Sonoma County wine lovers gathered at a table in a Petaluma restaurant on a recent Thursday evening to pull corks on 16 different classic bottles of wine.

Included in the lineup was a bottle from 1924, another from 1961, an iconic Napa Valley cabernet, two other red wines from Bordeaux, a 40-year-old barbaresco and a 1997 German auslese for dessert.

One of the best wines in the room was an old "right bank" red made primarily from Merlot. Everyone liked it. And no one brought up the movie "Sideways." In fact, almost everyone praised the wine as absolutely superior.

Today, 22 years after the film debuted, perhaps its odious and incorrect message has finally been put to rest.

For those who may have forgotten, "Sideways" was a popular film that caused many in the wine industry to convulse because of a single line of dialogue.

The film was essentially an homage to pinot noir. The main character in the film, Miles Raymond, was a disreputable vaunter who arrogantly trashes merlot.

His passion for pinot and his misguided anger toward merlot leads to his diatribe before entering a restaurant. He tells a friend, " ... if anyone orders merlot, I'm leaving. I am NOT drinking any %$#&@ merlot!"

Although the movie stimulated sales of pinot noir, it had an astoundingly negative reaction toward merlot. U.S. sales of this stellar grape and its wine began to slide. For the next 20 years, the variety languished.

In fact, for most of that two-decade period, if anyone who had seen the movie learned they were drinking a wine made with merlot, they would shudder and blame the movie.

Merlot is a superb grape variety, and the wine it produces can be reliably more interesting in many ways than cabernet sauvignon, to which it is related. They are part of the same "Bordeaux" grape family.

It was quite a decline for a grape that was so popular with consumers in the early 1990s, soon after "60 Minutes" aired a 1991 segment called "The French Paradox," which discussed the health benefits of red wine consumption among the French.

Merlot sales here blossomed. One of the industry leaders with the grape was a Napa Valley producer by the name of Dan Duckhorn, whose eponymous winery did as much as anyone to establish the variety's star-spangled image.

Dan Duckhorn passed away recently at age 87 of heart failure. I remember him fondly for his always-ready smile and his lighthearted attitude toward the film.

Dan well knew that merlot was the star grape in Bordeaux's "right bank" wines that could last nearly as long as did Bordeaux's "left bank" cabernet blends.

With Merlot as his primary calling card, Duckhorn eventually built one of the largest, most successful and prestigious wine companies in California. Today it includes properties in various locations.

And so it is with a bit of irony, perhaps, that Dan Duckhorn and I once joked that one of his favorite projects is a beautiful property in the cool Anderson Valley of Mendocino County called Goldeneye.

The merlot master with the grand sense of humor and an ever-present twinkle in his eye developed Goldeneye specifically to specialize in pinot noir. I suggested to him that maybe he should plant a little bit of merlot on that ranch.

I suspect he didn't take my suggestion seriously.

No wine of the week.