Blending

I was introduced to Sojourn wines at last year’s Beserkerfest and picked up a few single vineyard (SV) bottles (haven’t opened any yet). Recently I picked up some 2010 Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir’s and think they are terrific. The Sonoma Coast is a blend of 8 different vineyards, which leads me to my question.
It seems like SV wines are generally more expensive, but sometimes not rated as highly as blends. As a broad question, could one expect a blend (from a master winemaker) to be better than a SV as it allows the winemaker to balance rough edges that the SV wines may have?
I realize there is no specific answer, I’m more interseted in the discsussion of the art of blending.

As a Burgundy afficianado, to me, the concept of blending is abhorrent! :slight_smile: There, if you blend two vineyards, the wine is automatically “downgraded” to a generic 1er cru, or even a village-level wine.

Sometimes it may be an economic decision, when there isn’t enough juice to vinify, bottle, and sell the wine as a single vineyard. Maybe, in some cases, which I would think would be unusual, one could blend one wine with another to make up for some lack or defect. But vineyards are selected and cultivated precisely for their ability to deliver the goods - on their own. In the better cases, the mature vines will create a wine that reflects the soil characteristics, the terroir, and the wine will have a distinct personality that blending would only obscure. But maybe, if the vines are very young, the grapes won’t have the necessary character yet, and blending into some larger cuvee might be called for…

Many of the “lesser” wines are blends and are deliberately made to drink younger. They can often show extremely well and while the single vineyards may have more long-term potential they may be less ready to drink and less attractive for it.

Copain is one great example of this: their blended wines are very good and their single vineyards can sometimes be awkward or grumpy (more so after a little bottle age). Most times I’ve tasted, their midrange Les Voisins wines have been fantastic for right-now drinking, and the ones I would choose at that point. Long-term I’m sure at least some of the single vineyards will pass them (though I suspect some will not).

Bedrock’s Old Vines Zin is like this too.

BTW most Burgundy is blended as well and likely better for it. Only the best vineyards really merit bottling by themselves.

I thought of another case in France where blending, of a sort, is practised, and that is in Bordeaux, where each vineyard can have a mix of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cab Franc, and maybe one or two other permitted grapes. I know that Merlot ripens faster than Cabernet, so maybe in an “off” year more Merlot may go into the wine. But then there would be “extra” Cabernet, no? What would they do with that? :slight_smile:

The situation is similar in the Rhone where, at least in some areas, one can have Syrah, Mourvedre, and Grenache in the same vineyard (not sure if this is permitted in all areas though…). And I guess the blend is considered more attractive in those cases where it is practised.

Craig, when you say “most Burgundy” you are referring to the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, only to wine sold as Bourgogne Rouge or Blanc, village-level wines sold with just the village name, or to the less common case of combined 1er crus from the same village which can be sold as “Vosne 1er Cru” etc.

According to the numbers cited by Clive Coates in his book “The Wines of Burgundy”, only about 1/3 of the surface area in the Cote D’Or produces “generic” wine. There is more to Burgundy than the Cote D’Or, of course, but I suspect that most of that never makes it out of France. Certainly what I see on shelves here in America is virtually all non-blended, aside from Bourgogne Rouge and village wines without a vineyard name attached, and even with those it is more a case where small lots are “combined”, rather than wines being blended to achieve some better result.

In Burgundy, it may be commercially desirable to combine many small generic lots into a larger product for the marketplace, but I can’t think of a circumstance where blending might be used to increase the quality of the product.

I imagine it goes into their second or third label. I find most vintners who intentional blending (BDX style or CDP style) typically offer a lower-end bottling that uses up the remainder of the wines. If the vintner decides on a cab-heavy “left bank” style BDX blend, I imagine his/her lower end bottling would be Merlot-heavy. Same with CDP blenders … If Grenache or Mourvedre go heavy in the flagship bottle, the other will be heavy in the second or third offering.

Exactly. Most Burgundy. What you call the bottom of the barrel is most of the wine made. Look at a map of Nuits or Gevrey. Most of the vineyard names will rarely appear on a bottle.

As for improving by blending, how about blending 1er Cru wine into Village? It happens all the time. Plenty of good producers make very good blended 1er Cru wines as well (Drouhin, Bertheau, Dujac, D’Angerville, etc.).

My main point is that lesser wines are probably better as a result of blending, because the character of the terroir isn’t as good (or distinctive). Blending gives the winemaker an opportunity to compensate for deficiencies in the wines.

This is all good information for a beginner like me. Glad to be here on this forum. Cheers!

Theoretically, if you blend grapes from different vineyards, you may gain additional complexity while sacrificing terroir. However, in California many of the blends are from “lesser grapes” after the best grapes have already gone into the SVDs. So you still may get some additional complexity, but you’re not drinking what the winemaker considers to be their best grapes.

Personally, I often like blends better. I realize that I’m giving up some distinctiveness, but I dig the complexity that the best blends can provide. Like Craig, I also like the Copain Les Voisins offerings. Good value at the pricepoint IMO.

I have partaken in a few blending trials over the years and there is no reason to believe that blends are inherently worse wines than SV. In many cases a little blending fills in holes of the SV wine and makes it more complete. In the blending trials that I participated in, additions of just a couple of percent made a noticable difference. As US vineyard designations require 95% of the fruit originate from that vineyard, you can have some blending in SV wines. As SV wines sell for a premium, I assume that there is still some blending done to produce the best wine they can while retaining the ability to label is as SVD.

Past that it becomes an economic consideration of the winery. Often the less expensive, blended wines are also intended for earlier consumption and moved through the winery faster freeing up space and hopefully providing needed cash flow. The blended wines hopefully allow for a product for grapes not suitable for SV wines but without chanigng the blended product significantly worse. As mentioned before the SVD wines command a premium so having a lower blended wine is consistent with promoting the idea that the SVD wines are better and worth the higher price.

I have often wondered how wineries would make wines if the SVD wines were not commanding a higher price at retail.

We asked Fred Scherrer this question exactly for our video series, Ask a Winemaker. Fred makes the good point that a “vineyard” can be made of a lot of different plots that don’t work together themselves.

Here is the video, if interested: How do you make a blended wine from different vineyards? - YouTube

If and when you find yourself in a barrel room, I would suggest asking to taste individual clones if possible we just did that in Oregon and it was an amazing thing to see how the Wadenswil (in this example) was bright and short while the Pommard clones were broader and denser and seemed to make more sense as the back end of the wine.

Full disclosure, we film winemakers from all over at Ask a Winemaker, some of whom I represent in Chicago via my distribution business. Fred is one that I represent, and he is also a big part of the reason we started filming winemakers to begin with because of the quality of his answers.

I much prefer blends of BDX and GSM. If you develop your palate to prefer SVD Pinots, then go for it.