The Ancient French Variety: Carménère

Here is one of wine’s greatest detective stories. A noble Bordeaux grape is wiped out by plague and declared extinct. Then, more than a century later, a French scientist walks through a Chilean vineyard and realises that the country’s “Merlot” has secretly been the lost grape all along. That grape is Carménère — and today it is the signature of Chile¹.

A lost grape of Bordeaux

Carménère — its name comes from carmin, crimson — was once a prized red grape of Bordeaux, one of the classic six alongside Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Malbec and Petit Verdot¹. But it was difficult: late to ripen and prone to poor fruit set. When the phylloxera aphid devastated Bordeaux in the mid-nineteenth century, Carménère proved especially vulnerable, and growers did not replant it. By the twentieth century it was considered extinct².

A secret survival

It had, however, already escaped. In the 1850s, before phylloxera struck, cuttings of Bordeaux vines were shipped to Chile — and among the “Merlot” was Carménère, planted and propagated under the wrong name. Protected by Chile’s natural barriers of desert, ocean and mountains, the country stayed free of phylloxera, and the mislabelled vines flourished on their own original roots for well over a century³.

For 140 years, Chile’s “Merlot” was secretly a lost Bordeaux grape.— the Carménère rediscovery, 1994³

The 1994 rediscovery

The truth emerged in November 1994, when the French ampelographer Jean-Michel Boursiquot toured vineyards in Chile’s Maipo Valley. Something about the “Merlot” looked wrong — the leaves, the late ripening — and he recognised it: this was Carménère, the grape the world thought it had lost⁴. Chile had been quietly guarding a living relic of old Bordeaux.

Chile’s signature

Rather than an embarrassment, the mix-up became a gift. Chile embraced Carménère as its own national grape, and today the country grows more than ninety percent of the world’s plantings⁵. Ripe and well made, it gives a deep, plummy red with a savoury, peppery edge — a wine found almost nowhere else on Earth. The grape that vanished from France survives, and thrives, at the far end of the world.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• The oldest wine country in the Americas
• Malbec: another Bordeaux grape reborn abroad
• The phylloxera plague that erased it in France

References

1. Wine Enthusiast — Rediscovering Chilean Carménère. ↑
2. South America Wine Guide — Carménère Day & the Story of a Mistaken Identity. ↑
3. West Wines (Katarina’s Blog) — Carménère: The Almost-Extinct Bordeaux Grape Rediscovered in Chile. ↑
4. Wine with Seth (WineWiki) — Carménère Grape Variety. ↑
5. Winerist Magazine — The Fascinating Story Behind Carménère. ↑

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine

Hugh Johnson

Fine background on Bordeaux’s grapes and how the vine spread to the New World.

A Short History of Wine

Rod Phillips

Sets Chile’s phylloxera-free vineyards in the wider story of wine and disease.

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