A blended question: where’s the wine line drawn?

It can often be difficult to convince yourself to buy a blend of say Shiraz and Tempranillo or, even as we have found over the last few years, the classic Australian blend of Cabernet and Shiraz.

What does it taste like? Why wouldn’t I just buy a Shiraz or a Cabernet that I know and love? A good place to start, then, is to ask why blends even exist.

There are roughly two avenues that a winemaker may take when deciding to blend. One is commercial; a slightly smaller vintage than expected or a wine that is seeing demand grow faster than the grower can source fruit or plant new vines might put a splash of something else in the wine to reach their targeted volumes.

A winery only has to disclose the varieties in the wine if they exceed 15 per cent of the blend, so a Shiraz that is bolstered by some Cabernet, Grenache or maybe Mourvedre may not be labelled as such. This may not be noticeable to many tasters, but it is a slippery slope that is often driven by the numbers rather than the pursuit of good wine.

The second reason can be divided into dozens of avenues. Cabernet for example is often blended with Merlot, particularly in cooler climates where the Cabernet may not ripen perfectly in each year and with its slightly hard edges along with the famous “doughnut” hole in the middle of the palate. Merlot can serve to fill those gaps, providing a soft smooth texture and ripe berry fruits to complement the structure of the Cabernet.

This side of blending is driven by the desire to make complete, complex and interesting wines. After all, no vintage is the same as the last and each brings with it a different set of circumstances that a winemaker must work with, rather than against, to produce a wine that ticks all the boxes.

Blending different varieties is just one lever they can pull to create a wine reflective of the season.

The difficult part as a wine buyer is to decide whether the grower has chosen to blend varieties for quantitative or qualitative reasons. At the end of the day there is no guarantee of quality when opting for a single varietal wine over a blend other than familiarity of flavour. However, if the grower lays out why they elected to blend the grapes and what each grape brings to the wine then it is worth exploring the thousands of unique and delicious blends available. After all, Australia’s most iconic wine, Penfolds Grange, is almost always a blend incorporating a small percentage of Cabernet for the structural components it brings to the wine.

The Yarra Valley is a good example of a cool climate region where Cabernet can struggle to reach full ripeness in the cool years. The slightly harsh tannins can require significant time in the cellar to soften and integrate with the whole wine.

Bring some Merlot into the mix though and it provides a layer of soft ripe berry fruits that makes the wine much more approachable in its youth while the wine settles into its skin.

Under the winemaking guidance of Sarah Crowe at Yarra Yering, who is making some of the most acclaimed Cabernet in the country, this Warramate Cabernets ($27) blend is a perfect example of why a blend can be more than the sum of its parts. Elegant, seamless across the palate, where each grape is barely noticeable in its own right.

The hole in Cabernet’s structure is filled by the soft Merlot, the roundness of Merlot is well framed by the Cabernet. The lines are not that clear though, so well are the components integrated.