At my first liquor
store job, I had a sales rep (from some random company I can’t remember now)
who seemed to always have very interesting descriptors for the wines he was
peddling. The most memorable of those was his selling point for Carménère
(all his wines were
Chilean), a varietal he’d always claim was a “panty-dropper”. To this day I
have yet to have proof of this and I mostly suspect he was an idiot who probably
hadn’t even tasted the wines he was selling, but it’s always stuck with me,
mainly because it is hilarious.
Carménère has a very interesting background: it started as one of
the six grapes allowed for France’s Boredeaux AOP, but these days it is virtually
extinct in the region. After phylloxera devastated much of France’s vineyards in
the mid-1800s, it wasn’t really replanted due to its unpopularity and thus it became
the “lost” grape of Bordeaux. Luckily, cuttings of this varietal wound up in
Chile, where for years it was mistaken for Merlot. It wasn’t until DNA research
in 1994 proved that much of what Chilean wine-makers thought was Merlot was
actually Carménère and since 1998 the country has embraced
the varietal that is now considered the national grape of Chile.
I’ve found that wines made with Carménère are usually
very interesting (though not quite “panty-dropping”). They tend to be medium-bodied with distinct green pepper and spicy notes that pair very well with heavy meat
dishes. For quite a while I was under the impression that it was a varietal
that needed to be paired with food (mostly because that's what everyone always told me),
but since then I’ve started to enjoy it all on its own. I’ve had Montes’ Purple
Angel (a beautiful expression of this grape from the Colchagua Valley), but
since I can’t afford $70-ish wine all the time (or ever, really), I’ve sought
out other, more affordable Chilean Carménères.
The one I’ve been most impressed with recently was the Gryphus
Carménère, a very affordable wine from the Maule Valley in (it probably goes
without saying, but heck, I’ll say it anyway) Chile. It is 100% Carménère with
40% aged in used French oak barrels. This wine starts off bursting with flavors
of black cherry, blackberry and plum which are then quickly followed by notes green and
black pepper. It has a medium finish with smooth tannins and a slight acidity.
It had surprising complexity and elegance that I don’t usually expect in wines that are so inexpensive (under $10). This wine is more than enough proof that Carménère
has found a very good home in Chile… and maybe it really could be a
panty-dropper (though I’m still waiting on more concrete evidence of that
before I start using it as a descriptor).
