Comparing Grapes to Grapes

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Comparative wine tastings do have their advantages. It allows you to make side by side evaluations picking out details and nuances that you might miss if only sampling one bottle. In this particular tasting, Clare and I knew the wines, of course, but we bagged and shuffled the bottles so we didn't know which glass contained which wine. Our purpose was to see if we could really detect the difference between Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. And these wines provided the perfect comparison. If you take a look at the VIniCodes™ you can see that as for dry/sweet, rounded/edged and oak/no oak they were pretty similar. The interesting parts are the fruit and earth categories. Notice that as Cabernet was introduced into the blend, the wines became progressively less fruity and more earthy. We enjoyed all of the wines but the one that we thought was the most interesting was the 50-50 blend. It contained the best of both worlds; the fruitiness of the Merlot and the complexity of the Cabernet. Also favoring this wine was its vintage. The Cabernet/Merlot blend has had a year longer to mature than the other two. But most importantly, Clare nailed the identities! We suggest that you try a tasting like this. Get two varietals and one blend from the same producer. This narrows the parameters of the tasting and allows you to focus your attention on one particular category of style.