Wine Chronicles: How Meritage Gave California Blends a Name - Dining and Cooking

Summary: California winemakers had long understood that cabernet sauvignon could improve when blended with merlot, cabernet franc and other Bordeaux varieties, but labeling laws made those wines difficult to sell as premium bottling. Joseph Phelps Vineyards helped break the pattern with Insignia, a proprietary name that freed the wine from the generic “Red Table Wine” designation. A later effort to establish a shared category for top-tier Bordeaux-style blends drew more than 6,000 naming entries and produced “meritage,” a term combining merit and heritage. The category gave wineries a common language for wines that did not fit neatly within varietal rules.

“The name that was finally chosen was ‘meritage.’ It is pronounced identical to ‘heritage.’ It is a blended word combining ‘merit’ and ‘heritage.’” — Dan Berger

NAPA VALLEY, Calif. — Most people would say California’s greatest winemaking achievement is cabernet sauvignon, which by law (since 1976) must have at least 75% of that grape in the bottle. But dozens of winemakers have discovered that 75% cabernet doesn’t always produce the best wine.

Many have found that they could craft a better wine if they used a few other grapes, similar to the grand tradition that has been popular for hundreds of years in Bordeaux, where smaller amounts of merlot, cabernet franc and other “Bordeaux family” grapes blended to make a better wine than does cabernet sauvignon on its own. Indeed, some of the best wines in Bordeaux have only tiny portions of cabernet sauvignon.

But none of this mattered in the slightest to Americans — until about 40 years ago. Since the end of Prohibition in 1933 and through the 1950s, California’s most widely produced dry wines were simple generic blends that sold for $1 to $2 per bottle. Almost all of these wines were called “Red Table Wine.” Their greatest attribute was that they were wet. Quality was not an issue.

(The most popular U.S. wines in the 1940s and 1950s were sweet and were called port, sherry, muscatel and Tokay. Almost all of them were fortified with neutral grain spirits.)

Back then, if 1,000 people were asked to identify the word “cabernet,” I suspect that 99% would say it was an Italian sports car. It wasn’t until the late 1950s when varietal wines began to be produced on any scale, and then the law permitted the grape name to appear on the front label if the wine had at least 51% of that grape.

The great California wine renaissance that began in the early 1970s brought with it a relatively sophisticated group of young winemakers, many of whom had done their due diligence and had discovered one of the secrets of great Bordeaux wines: Blends could be excellent.

It all began with most of them producing 100% cabernet sauvignons, which received praiseworthy reviews but often with a proviso: A few of the 100% wines were deemed a bit too astringent. But California had an answer. As Bordeaux had done for decades, the Californians began using smaller amounts of merlot, a grape that’s not as tannic as its more rustic big brother. Merlot softened cabernet.

Soon it became apparent to many producers that a vintage might come along in which the cabernet sauvignon was rougher than it had been, so merlot and cabernet franc became more widely used to craft more harmonious wines that still had 75% cabernet — so it could retain its more popular name.

One reason nobody wanted to go below 75% cabernet sauvignon was that the varietal name on the wine was what sold it as a premium product. If the wine had been only 70% cabernet sauvignon and 30% other Bordeaux grapes, even though it might be a better wine, it would have to be called Red Table Wine — the exact same designation that had been used two decades earlier to refer to the simplest red wines in the country.

As a result, unsophisticated wine-buyers might see a price of $10 or $12, which was then about the highest price a domestic wine could command, and would ignore that bottle because it was technically a generic wine. Better wines were named for the primary grape.

The 1974 vintage in Napa was warm and gave winemakers a chance to make a great cabernet sauvignon. The Joseph Phelps Vineyard, on the eastern side of St. Helena, did just that under the hand of winemaker Walter Schug. He knew this was a reserve-caliber wine. It was still aging in barrels in 1975, when the next vintage came along.

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But 1975 was a significantly cooler year — a year that truly benefits merlot more than CS. The cabernet sauvignon grapes that year were not quite as voluptuous as in 1974. The 1974 wine was bottled without a label, while the 1975 Phelps red wine was still being assembled from its various component parts. And what Schug and his assistant, Craig Williams, discovered was that the best red wine they could make in 1975 had a lot more merlot than they had an anticipated. The blend was 84% merlot, 16% cabernet.

So although the two wines were both reserve-quality, only one of them could be called cabernet sauvignon and sell at a premium price. But the 1975 wine could not be called cabernet sauvignon. It was a merlot, and merlot almost never was seen as a premium wine. The winery knew that consumers would disparage a “Red Table Wine” selling for a lot of money.

So Phelps decided to do something radical. It began calling its finest red wine Insignia, using a proprietary designation that it hoped would allow both wines to be sold for what they really were, reserve-quality wines. This did something else: Phelps avoided having to use the odious term Red Table Wine.

This had a profound impact on dozens of other California wineries that wanted to produce a super-premium red and avoid “Red Table Wine” as a designation. Even though a dozen other fanciful names were developed through the early 1980s to designate high-quality cabernet blends, Phelps’ Insignia remained one of the most important.

Other proprietary terms that were being developed represented a hodgepodge. I saw this as a point of confusion for consumers who were not aware of what was happening.

About 1982, a wine-marketing seminar was conducted at Franciscan Vineyards. The president of the winery, Agustin Huneeus, was in attendance. During a round-table discussion, I said that some of the most important wines in California at the time were still called Red Table Wine and that the numerous proprietary designations that were being used all failed to describe the premium nature of most such wines.

I told the group that until there was a single category name that tied all of these premium wines together and all producing wineries observed a set of uniform regulations, the consumer would continue to be confused by all of the different blends. Huneeus was intrigued by the idea. So was Rick Theis, a Santa Rosa resident and one of the four founding partners of the Murphy Goode-Winery in Alexander Valley.

Days later, I called Huneeus and then Theis from my desk at The San Diego Union, where I was writing a wine column. Both men said they were dedicated to the concept of creating a single category for premium Bordeaux grape blends. I wrote a column about this idea, and Huneeus and Theis decided to stage an international contest seeking suggestions from the public.

Although I wasn’t directly involved in the category-naming contest, I began writing a series of regulations for the new group that I perceived necessary for this new identifier for premium Bordeaux blends. One regulation was that any member winery had to agree that its wine was a “top-of-the-line” wine, so inexpensive wines could never be made under this category.

I also suggested that a white version of a Bordeaux blend could also be called by the same designation. Such a wine was required to be a blend of sauvignon blanc and semillon — and muscadelle, if available.

Even before the contest was concluded, it was evident that several wineries were excited to proceed with using the designation, whatever it turned out to be. Dry Creek Vineyards’ owner David Stare was one of the first to commit to doing this because Dry Creek Valley is a wonderful region for both cabernet and merlot, and the latter frequently is exceptional, especially in cooler years.

Theis coordinated the contest to find the proper name. He was aided by an unusual volunteer, Dick Graff, a principal in chardonnay and pinot noir house Chalone in Monterey County. Graff was an unlikely supporter of the concept because Chalone didn’t make a cabernet or a red Bordeaux blend.

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Theis received more than 6,000 entries from around the world. Among the entries were at least a dozen that probably were only sent in to illicit laughter — which they did. The name that was finally chosen was “meritage.” It is pronounced identical to “heritage.” It is a blended word combining “merit” and “heritage.”

Winemaker Mitch Cosentino in Napa loved the idea and became the first to use meritage once it was approved, on his 1986 red wine “The Poet.” Soon after that, Dry Creek Vineyards released its 1985 meritage. Dry Creek still makes a meritage. The current release is from 2021 ($75) and is 60% cabernet sauvignon, 18% cabernet franc, 13% petit verdot and 9% malbec

My contest entry was élevage, a term used in France in thoroughbred horse-breeding. It was not selected, but in 1989 Doug Fletcher, then the winemaker for Chimney Rock Winery in Stags Leap, liked my name so much that he adopted it and began using élevage for a premium red wine blend. I still have a few bottles of the 1990 élevage that Fletcher made.

Chimney Rock still makes an élevage red ($120) as well as a white wine companion ($55).

California cabernet probably began nearly 150 years ago in either Sonoma Valley or the Santa Cruz Mountains, depending on what source you read. The first early cabernets were assumed to be 100% cabernet, depending on the source material. At about the same time, or perhaps a few years later, cabernet sauvignon was considered to be a premium variety in the Livermore Valley (depending on the source).

Over the last decade, the majority of cabernet sauvignon planted in Livermore has taken a backseat to its parent, cabernet franc.

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Dan Berger has been writing about wine since 1975.

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