![Amuse Bouche, Napa Valley [Merlot/Cabernet Franc] 2012](https://www.wineyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Amuse-Bouche-Napa-Valley-MerlotCabernet-Franc-2012.jpg)
Wine Score
Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate
The 2006 Proprietary Red H Block Hudson Vineyard offers spicy, chocolaty, menthol, burning ember, red and black fruit, asphalt, truffle, graphite, and oak characteristics. While this is an impressive offering, the tannins are more noticeable than they were last year, and the wine is more closed and backward.
The Arietta Wines
Arietta Red Wine Variation One is a blend of Merlot and Syrah, also from the Hudson Vineyards. The Syrah, from Hudson’s Hermitage selection grown in gravel unusual in the Carneros, is co-fermented with the Merlot to give the blend a wild and penetrating quality. If the H Block wine is an homage to the Right Bank of Bordeaux, Variation One is a Napa Valley original. The plum and licorice aromas of Merlot blend imperceptibly with the forest floor, wild game qualities attributable to the Syrah in a wine without antecedent anywhere in the world. The vinification, barrel ageing, and bottling are similar to the Arietta H Block wine. Variation One may be served young, especially with wilder dishes, but the powerful, if supple, tannin will support its evolution in bottle for at least ten years.
The Merlot is grown in the Hudson Vineyards G and I Blocks, which lie immediately below the H Block. Typically, the two varietals are picked simultaneously and co-fermented, assuring a marriage of the varieties. The Cabernet Franc provides the cassis, blueberry, brown sugar character, while the Merlot brings dark chocolate to the aroma and a chewy richness to the finish. Harvested near the extreme of ripeness, the wine is fermented with its indigenous yeast, macerated with the skins for six weeks, and then aged for twenty months in mostly new French oak barrels. Naturally clarified by traditional Bordeaux racking, the blend is bottled without fining or filtration. The intense concentration masks the substantial tannin, which assures an evolution in bottle of at least ten years.
Grape Variety
Merlot – Syrah Wine
Merlot – Syrah (Shiraz in Australia) are two of the world’s most widely planted red grapes, each producing exceptional varietal wine in its own right. Blended, the two have complementary characteristics and the potential to produce anything from cheap table wine through to rich prestige wines.
Though France may be the spiritual home of both Merlot and Syrah (the varieties hail from Bordeaux and the Rhone Valley, respectively), the French do not typically combine the two, and just a handful of Vin de Pays wines use the blend. The combination is much more common in Italy, where relaxed IGT wine laws allow winemakers the freedom to experiment with these two internationally popular varieties.
In California, the popularity of the blend is unsurprising, given Merlot’s success in the 1990s and Syrah’s rapid growth in the new millennium. With such large volumes of Merlot and Syrah grown in the Sunshine State, it makes sense that the two would be blended together to create wines with broad commercial appeal.
Syrah, for all its weight and body, forms much of the blend’s structure and also provides the inky dark coloring that makes the wine so dense and attractive. Sometimes Syrah’s peppery side comes through, adding some spice to the wine, but usually the blend is made in a style that promotes Syrah’s flavors of blueberry, boysenberry and mulberry. Merlot, meanwhile, adds fruit flavors of plum, currants and dark cherries.
Wines made from Merlot and Syrah may be aged in oak barrels to round out some of the more overt fruit tones and provide suitable structure for aging, or they made be made in a simple, fruit-forward style designed for early consumption. Other countries where the blend is widely used are Spain, South Africa, Argentina and Australia, although here the iconic Shiraz grape is more often blended with Bordeaux’s other favorite, Cabernet Sauvignon.
Food matches for Merlot – Syrah wines include:
- Grilled veal chops with fresh herbs
- Chilli Con Carne
- Meatballs in a herb and tomato sauce
Region
Carneros Wine
(Los) Carneros is one of California’s oldest and most celebrated viticultural areas. It was first planted with grapes in the 1830s, and now ranks among the world’s top regions for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, particularly when the two varieties are combined to make sparkling wines in the traditional method. (© Copyright material, Wine-Searcher.com)
The official Carneros AVA (created in 1983) covers an area of 90 square miles (230 square km) on the southernmost foothills of the Mayacamas and Sonoma mountain ranges. This location means the AVA is divided between America’s two most famous wine-producing regions – the eastern half in Napa, the western half in Sonoma. Many producers label their wines as “Carneros Napa Valley” or “Carneros Sonoma Valley”, depending on which side of the county line they are located.
The topography here – and the cool, windy mesoclimate it creates – is intimately connected with the style of wine produced here. As the mountains disappear (they drop down into San Francisco Bay before rising again in Contra Costa County), so does the protection they provide from the cold, wet winds which blow in from the Pacific Ocean, 30 miles (50km) west of Carneros. This gives Carneros a much cooler, wetter climate than that found further north in the sheltered valleys. This gap in the mountains is known as the Petaluma Gap, and its influence extends beyond Carneros into other AVAs including Sonoma Coast, Russian River Valley and even the southern end of Napa Valley.
This cool, windy, foggy mesoclimate proved extremely challenging for the early vineyard, particularly when combined with the combined effects of phylloxera and Prohibition. It was not until the late 1970s that the area’s vineyards began to achieve any consistent quality and recognition, long after the central Napa Valley had established its post-Prohibition wine industry. By the late 1980s, many hundreds of acres of vineyard had been planted in the AVA, and the reputation of Carneros wines began rising to its current glory.
Carneros’ winemakers were quick to realize the potential of their terroir for cooler-climate wine styles. Besides varietal Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, they also make high-quality sparkling wines from the two varieties. In the 1980s, Champagne house Taittinger chose Carneros as the location for its Californian presence (Domaine Carneros), at around the same time as Cava magnates Jose and Gloria Ferrer started their sparkling wine production here.
Carneros Pinot Noir has traditionally been lighter and tighter than those from other Californian regions, with notes of berries and herbs, rather than anything deeper and more opulent. This makes it particularly obvious when a winemaker has been over-enthusiastic with the use of oak. Likewise, Carneros Chardonnay is typically more elegant than other Californian Chardonnays, with crisper acidity and fresh stone-fruit aromas. It is easy to see why a fair proportion of the district’s grapes are purchased by wineries from warmer regions, for use in sparkling wines. These Burgundian varieties dominate the vineyards here, jointly accounting for around 90 percent of the total vineyard area. In warmer, sheltered spots, mostly on the Napa side of the AVA, they are sometimes joined by small quantities of Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.
The wines below are from the Napa Valley side of the Carneros AVA. To see those from Sonoma’s portion of Carneros, please see Carneros – Sonoma.
Producer Notes
About Arietta Wines
Arietta Wines is a super-premium Napa Valley wine producer specializing in site-specific Bordeaux-style blends. The wines are produced with fruit from carefully selected blocks within some of Napa Valley’s best cool-climate vineyards, and are given names that relate to music, like On The White Keys, Quartet and Variation One. Since 2005, the wines have been made by consulting winemaker Andy Erickson, who is linked to notable Napa Valley wineries including Screaming Eagle, Staglin and Dalla Valle.
The estate was founded in 1996, and the first wine was produced from a mere hectare (2.3 acres) of Cabernet Franc from Hudson Vineyards’ H Block in Carneros. Arietta now sources fruit from additional blocks of Hudson Vineyards for production of Variation One, a blend of Merlot and Syrah, and Cabernet Sauvignon from small parcels in Howell Mountain and Coombsville has gone into Arietta’s largest production wine, Quartet, since 2003.
In 2005, Arietta produced its first and only white wine, On The White Keys, made from Sauvignon Blanc grown on hillsides in Sonoma Mountain and old-vine Sémillon from Hyde Vineyards in Carneros. The wines’ labels all feature the manuscript of renowned classical composer Beethoven’s Arietta movement from Opus 111, his last Piano Sonata.
