I recently attended a Duckhorn Vineyards tasting and had the pleasure of revisiting their flagship Three Palms Vineyard Merlot. The 2023 vintage, released as Duckhorn’s 50th anniversary bottling, was everything I enjoy in a well-made red wine: silky, soft tannins, ripe fruit without being overly ripe, and an elegance that didn’t demand attention. It was beautifully balanced, inviting, and thoroughly enjoyable. In some ways, it felt like getting reacquainted with an old friend, one I hadn’t spent much time with in years.
That glass also reminded me of a movie that came out 22 years ago and changed the way a surprising number of people thought about Merlot. In 2004, Sideways introduced moviegoers to Miles Raymond, a frustrated writer, devoted Pinot Noir enthusiast, and a man whose personal life was in considerably worse shape than his knowledge of wine. Played brilliantly by Paul Giamatti, Miles delivered an unforgettable outburst about his refusal to drink Merlot. The line was funny, the movie was excellent, and somehow an entire grape variety ended up taking the blame for one man’s emotional problems. Merlot had committed an unforgivable offense: it wasn’t Pinot Noir.
The Movie That Gave Merlot a Bad Name
I enjoyed Sideways, and I still consider it a wonderful film. But looking back, Merlot deserved better. Miles was hardly a character whose judgment anyone should have followed without question. He was insecure, frequently miserable, occasionally dishonest, and not particularly successful at managing his own affairs. Yet when it came to wine, audiences took his opinions seriously. His affection for Pinot Noir was understandable; his contempt for Merlot was something else entirely.
The effect became known as the Sideways effect, and it wasn’t imaginary. Researchers who examined wine sales after the film’s release found a measurable benefit for Pinot Noir and a more modest negative effect on Merlot. The damage wasn’t as dramatic as some accounts suggested, but the shift in perception was real enough to attract academic attention.
Merlot wasn’t entirely innocent of its own troubles. During the 1990s, its popularity encouraged producers to plant more vines and bring more bottles to market, and not all of those wines were memorable. Many were soft, simple, and perfectly pleasant, but hardly the kind of wine that inspired excitement. When consumers began looking for something different, Sideways gave them a convenient reason to move on. Still, it’s unfair that an entire grape should suffer because a fictional wine enthusiast was having a bad week.
There’s another delicious irony in the film. Miles saves a treasured bottle of 1961 Château Cheval Blanc for a special occasion, and Cheval Blanc, one of Bordeaux’s legendary wines, has historically relied heavily on Cabernet Franc and Merlot. When Miles finally opens it, he drinks it alone from a Styrofoam cup in a fast-food restaurant. Merlot, it turns out, was perfectly acceptable when it came dressed in a sufficiently prestigious Bordeaux label.
Merlot Was Never Just a Supporting Player
For much of my time around wine, I remember Merlot being discussed as an important blending grape, particularly in relation to Cabernet Sauvignon. Its generous fruit and generally softer tannins could help round out Cabernet’s firmer structure, and Cabernet Franc benefited from Merlot’s contribution in many traditional Bordeaux blends. That description was accurate as far as it went, but it didn’t tell the whole story. On Bordeaux’s Right Bank, particularly in Pomerol and Saint-Émilion, Merlot had long been capable of taking the leading role. Some of the region’s most admired wines were built around the grape, demonstrating that it could offer elegance, concentration, complexity, and the ability to age beautifully.
California took longer to recognize that potential. When Dan and Margaret Duckhorn established their Napa Valley winery in 1976, Merlot was still commonly regarded as a useful blending partner rather than a serious varietal wine. The Duckhorns saw something more. Their inaugural 1978 vintage included Merlot from Three Palms Vineyard, beginning a relationship that would help establish the grape’s reputation in Napa Valley.
That history made my recent tasting all the more enjoyable. Three Palms had a serious pedigree long before Miles ever opened his mouth, and the 2023 release marks fifty years of the winery that championed it. Even so, the wine is not entirely Merlot. Its 89 percent Merlot is joined by small amounts of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Malbec, a reminder that blending remains part of the winemaker’s craft even in a wine celebrated for its Merlot character.
A Little Dirt, a Little Sunshine, and a Lot of Character
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about wine is how the same grape can produce remarkably different results depending on where it’s grown. You don’t need to be a soil scientist to appreciate that a Merlot from Bordeaux can taste quite different from one grown in Napa Valley. Pomerol is a good example, because some of its most celebrated vineyards sit on clay-rich soils. Clay retains moisture, which is valuable during dry growing seasons, and Merlot tends to ripen earlier than Cabernet Sauvignon. That combination of soil, climate, and careful vineyard management produces wines with impressive depth and structure.
Three Palms offers a striking contrast. Located near Calistoga in Napa Valley, the vineyard is known for its rocky, well-drained soils, including volcanic stones. The vines grow in a warmer environment, where managing water and ripeness becomes especially important, and the stony ground naturally limits their vigor. The resulting wines are generous and concentrated without sacrificing balance.
Merlot travels well beyond these two places. Washington’s Columbia Valley pairs warm, sunny days with cool nights, producing Merlots that combine ripe fruit with refreshing acidity. On the Tuscan coast, Masseto has shown that Merlot alone can make one of Italy’s most coveted wines. Merlot, it seems, isn’t fussy about its address, only about who’s tending the vines.
Those people matter more than they’re often given credit for. The 2023 Three Palms spent 18 months in French oak, three-quarters of it new, and its final blend reflects choices made in the cellar as much as in the vineyard. Climate and soil shape the raw material, but the winemaker still decides what ends up in the bottle.
Merlot Goes Into Outer Space
If the story ended with Sideways, Bordeaux, and Napa Valley, it would already be an interesting chapter in wine history. But Merlot had greater ambitions. In November 2019, twelve bottles of Pétrus 2000 were sent to the International Space Station as part of a scientific experiment studying how the space environment might affect wine aging. Yes, Pétrus: one of the world’s most expensive and celebrated wines, made in Pomerol almost entirely from Merlot. While American moviegoers had been encouraged to question the grape’s merits, scientists were sending one of its greatest expressions hundreds of miles above Earth.
The bottles spent 438 days in orbit before returning in January 2021. They weren’t there for the astronauts to enjoy with dinner. The purpose was to examine how wine might change when exposed to conditions very different from those in a traditional cellar, including microgravity and the broader space environment.
When the wine returned, a tasting was arranged in Bordeaux to compare it with bottles of the same vintage that had remained on Earth. Among the participants was wine writer Jane Anson, who found the space-traveled Pétrus more evolved, with more floral and smoky aromatics, the same characteristics Pétrus develops naturally as it ages. By her estimate, it seemed one to three years further along than its earthbound counterpart.
Before anyone starts planning to age a wine collection in orbit, a few things are worth remembering. The tasting involved a limited number of bottles, and normal bottle variation could account for some of the differences. Researchers also couldn’t determine which aspects of the space environment were responsible for the changes. We don’t yet know whether wine ages better in space; we only know that sending an exceptionally expensive Bordeaux into orbit raised some interesting questions, along with what must have been one of the more unusual wine tastings ever conducted.
I can’t help imagining what Miles would have thought of all this. The grape he so passionately rejected traveled roughly 250 miles above the planet, spent more than a year circling Earth, and returned to a serious tasting in Bordeaux. Merlot had gone where few wines had gone before. Miles, meanwhile, had trouble getting through a week in Santa Barbara.
So, Is Merlot Back?
That’s a question wine writers have been asking for years, often with the enthusiasm normally reserved for a long-awaited celebrity comeback. But it may be the wrong question. Merlot never disappeared. Great producers continued making it, collectors continued buying it, and wine lovers unconcerned with Hollywood’s opinions continued drinking it. Pétrus didn’t lose its standing because of Sideways, and neither did the best wines of Pomerol, Saint-Émilion, or Napa Valley.
What changed was the grape’s popular image, particularly among American consumers who had come to associate Merlot with ordinary, inexpensive red wine. Pinot Noir became the fashionable choice, and Merlot spent years trying to shake off a reputation it never entirely deserved. There’s nothing wrong with preferring Pinot Noir; it’s a wonderful grape, capable of producing some of the most beautiful wines in the world. But wine appreciation becomes considerably less interesting when we let fashion decide what belongs in our glass.
My recent experience with Duckhorn’s 2023 Three Palms was a pleasant reminder of that. I wasn’t thinking about sales figures, movie dialogue, or whether Merlot had regained its popularity. I was enjoying a beautifully made wine with silky tannins, lovely balance, and just enough ripeness to make another sip inviting. It was an old friend, well worth getting reacquainted with.
Twenty-two years after Sideways, Merlot has survived Hollywood, endured changing tastes, and even traveled into outer space. It’s time we stopped asking whether it’s fashionable again.
I’d rather just pour another glass.
