Explainer
This is a "clone" of chardonnay - so it's more or less the same DNA, but has different characteristics that were teased out by lots of grafting and cuttings.
Chardonnay Musque doesn't seem like a chardonnay at all. It's very aromatic and often has a floral or even spicy nose. It's also much fruitier than "regular" chardonnay - expect peach, melon or grapefruit as well as more typical apple notes. In France it's used mainly for blending, but a number of producers in Ontario and British Columbia release chardonnay musque on its own.
The musque part means aromatic in French and also perhaps is a nod to "muscat", one of the grapier, more aromatic varietals. Musques are usually fairly full bodied for a white as well.
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Like carmenere, now big in Chile, Malbec - which has been staked as Argentina's signature red - was originally grown in Bordeaux. Malbec is still grown in France and makes the inky dark wines of Cahors, but it's no longer important in Bordeaux.
With malbec, you can expect a very dark full bodied mouth filler, with dark red fruit and a certain "roughness", though this can be tamed.
In Argentina the warm, dry weather means riper grapes less likely to suffer from mildew. The better quality of the grapes at harvest is almost certainly what makes Argentina's malbecs smoother and more enjoyable. That said, there is still often a rustic quality and you can see why the Bordelais only used it as a minor part of the blend.
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As California’s wine industry matured through the 1970s and the French became increasingly protective of their regional names for wines, a movement started to give a new generic name for the classic Bordeaux blend (cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc, malbec, petit verdot, or any combination thereof). According to Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine, the name meritage was selected after a competition run by the Los Angeles Times.
Meritage is meant to rhyme with “heritage”, and generally does in the United States. In Canada, however, where the name has also been adopted, it tends to rhyme with “Taj” as in Mahal. This is probably as a result of the combination of association of wine with France, the fact that every English Canadian has at least some knowledge of French, and the fact that that’s how French speakers would pronounce it.
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Once the "lost grape of Bordeaux", where they gave up on it over a hundred years ago, this difficult-to-ripen red has established itself as one of Chile's main varietals. Usually dark, full bodied and quite fruity, carmenere can often have "off" notes that are difficult to tame. My own view is that it works better in a blend with merlot (indeed it was for many years mistaken for merlot in the vineyards of Chile), but some winemakers can turn out a decent single varietal version.
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The star of Tuscany, sangiovese is the grape used to make Chianti, Brunello di Montalcino and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, among other wines. There can be an enormous amount of variety between sangioveses, not least because it’s a difficult grape to grow and ripen. There are also many different “clones” that give different characteristics even though they’re all technically the same grape – so a sangiovese can range from mean and thin to luxuriously fruity and full-bodied.
The higher end DOC/DOCG wines like Chianti Classico and Brunello di Montalcino have a minimum threshold of quality and so represent a reliable choice in the absence of a specific recommendation. Characteristic fruit notes are cherries and plums and the wines are usually lighter in colour.
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The world's finest pinot noirs come from Burgundy. Legendary wines like La Tache and Domaine Romanee-Conti (DRC to the cognoscenti) are fought over in auction rooms and can fetch thousands of dollars for a single bottle. The region is also a complicated patchwork of miniature vineyards, some with several producers sharing the same one. Therefore it's important to pay attention to the producer as well as the district, as the fame and reputation of the region means that less, shall we say, dedicated producers sometimes take unmerited advantage of the high prices they can command. That said, it is always possible to find a good one under $20 - but you may need to dig around.
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Lots of cheap and mediocre efforts conspire to keep this underrated white off the top table, but when it's good, it can be very good. Chenin Blanc is a white grape originating in France. There, wines from Loire Valley, especially the Touraine appellations of Saumur and Vouvray, are made from it. In addition to whites from dry to sweet, chenin makes well-reputed sparkling wines. Chenin is also made into botrytis-affected sweet wines. Unfortunately, we don't see much of this Loire specialty for sale in Canada.
In South Africa, chenin blanc is sometimes also called "steen". There's a lot of mediocre stuff, but better quality South Africans are often oak-aged and are usually dry with fairly robust peach and other white fruit that seems to come to the fore after you get used to the oak notes.
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