The great Merlot tasting of '08

Today as a training exercise at our wine steward meeting we ending the day with a blind merlot tasting. Although my palate and I were fading quickly, here's what the 18 wine (three flights of 6 each by region). All we knew going into the flights were the fact that they were Merlots. Tasted wines listed in bold.

Flight 1) Australia

- since our import section of austrailian merlots is pretty small, none of these wines were more than $9 retail. Believe it or not Yellow Tail Merlot was my favorite, although the competition was Alice White, Lindemans, Jacob's Creek, Rosemount and Penfold's. It seemed to be the most popular on the whole too. Rosemount was second followed by Penfold's for me. I must say I was expecting the Yellow Tail to be a more expensive wine.

Flight 2) California

- here I had a split on favorite of the group. I was more or less tied for Toasted Head and Robert Mondavi Napa. These are around $13 and $22, respectively. Taking another look at my tasting notes at home I would have to give the edge to Mondavi as I noted the Toasted Head finish was fairly short, although had some interesting things going on in the nose. Others tasted were Fetzer, Beringer Napa (or was it Knight's Valley?) and some other wine that I didn't catch. The surprise was the Beringer Merlot, which was my least favorite, which is rough at $20+. It was soft, with light berries but fell dead in my mouth. No finish and hardly a mid-palate for me. Fetzer, around $6, was real easy drinking, so a good deal if you're in to that category.

Flight 3) Washington

- Merlot is Washington's grape. Another split for me on this flight with Chateau Ste. Michelle and Northstar, $12 and $40 respectively. The Ste. Michelle gave some nice cherry flavors, good fruit depth and nice tannins while Northstar you could tell had some more oak on it, was showing quite well and had the best aftertaste of them all. We also did Covey Run, Silvan Ridge, Columbia Crest Grand Estates and Blue Moon. Pass on the Blue Moon big time.

All in all it was a fun exercise and honestly kind of made me feel a bit uneasy. What if I liked the cheapest wine? What if I can't differentiate enough between them? The only big surprise was Beringer Napa Merlot price/quality-wise. It's a great way to build your palate and learn to trust yourself to make your own decisions about what you are drinking.

We hit up a decent amount of wines at the meeting and perhaps I'll stop by in the next few days and let you know some of the highlights and wines that you can look for on the shelves. I also got a few bottles of homework to take care of over the next couple of weeks so I'll fill y'all in on that too. Off the top of my head we are looking forward to:

-Renwood old vine zin 2005
-Clos du Val Cab
-Clos du Val Merlot
-some white bordeaux
-Yellow Tail Sparkling (already drank, not bad, will please the YT crowd. a bit sweet)
-Columbia Crest Horse Heaven Hills Merlot (had at tasting, too, yummy merlot...more to follow)

Cheers!