Do you remember Merlot? Why grapes come in and out of fashion | David Williams

Domaine Bel Avenir Beaujolais Nouveau, Beaujolais, France 2022 (£13.33, or £12 as part of a 6-bottle mixed case, wickhamwine.co.uk) Trends in the wine are as cyclical as any other product, although a single turn of the wheel of wine world fashion seems to take longer than the Mark Cavendish-at-full-pelt split second it takes to take clothes and music from new to pallid to sophisticated retro. It took a while, for example, for wine trendsetters to salvage the reputation of Beaujolais' favorite 'new' wines, exuberant and fruity, fresh off the press of the 1970s and 1980s. much to the natural wine scene - which championed the gluggable (or glou-glou as the French have it) drinkability of wines made using the same carbonic maceration winemaking technique that gave (and gives) Beaujolais Nouveau its easy-new fruitiness has come back into fashion over the past decade. And Domaine Bel Avenir's contribution from this year's harvest brings a burst of brilliant berries to remind us skeptics why it was so popular in the first place.

Errazuriz Estate Reserva Merlot, Curicó Valley, Chile 2021 (£9.99, or £8.99 as part of a six-bottle mixed case, majestic.co.uk) Varietals are particularly susceptible to fashion swings. Chardonnay is the obvious example: a huge hit when the first Australian and California versions with butter and tropical fruits appeared in the 1980s, it was fiercely criticized in the 1990s and 2000, although it is the source of some of the greatest white wines (white burgundy, champagne) in the world. The red equivalent may well be Merlot, which for a time in the 1990s and early 2000s was the sweet, fruity red of choice, but never quite recovered from the reputation it received. (or was seen as receiving) in the 2004 wine-themed film, Sideways. It all seems a little silly when you taste a suavely plump, plum-like example like Errazuriz, which shares many of the qualities of wines made from the grape that replaced Merlot in many drinkers' repertoires, Malbec, but with a little more depth. and a satisfying grainy texture that you don't usually find at this kind of price.

Faustino I Gran Reserva, Rioja, Spain 2010 (£17, Tesco) A fashion look wine that all of us might think we should be able to rise above is the packaging. We know, deep down, that there is no causal link between poor winemaking and lousy labeling. We could even argue, as several importers have told me over the years, that bad labeling in some cases implies good winemaking, as it suggests that the winemaker was too busy in the vineyard or in the cellar to worry about something. as trivial as the packaging. Still, that first impression is very hard to shake, and the appearance of the bottle plays a much bigger role in what we end up drinking than we'd like to admit. Admittedly, in my case, the frosted glass, gold netting and Rembrandt detailing of the Rioja Faustino brand gran reserva has always been a fucking ersatz, a bit tired old tapas restaurant, a bit of a duty free shop circa 1983 But the wine inside, which I discovered recently, is really, really good: classic, deeply flavored, coconut-infused, flavorful rioja. Is it fashionable? We do not care? It's absolutely delicious.

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