This episode is part of tasting every grape in the world, a series working through the world’s wine grapes one full bottle at a time.
Carmenere is the grape France gave up for dead. Once one of the six red varieties blended into the great wines of Bordeaux, it was wiped out at home when the phylloxera bug tore through Europe’s vineyards in the 1860s. Too awkward to graft, growers pulled it out and moved on, and by 1900 it was gone. Except it wasn’t. Cuttings taken to Chile in the 1850s had quietly thrived there for over a hundred years, mislabelled as Merlot, until a French scientist and a 1994 DNA test revealed the truth: the lost Bordeaux grape was alive and well in South America. Today Chile grows more Carmenere than anywhere on earth. This bottle, the 2022 De Martino Legado from the Maipo Valley, gives you black cherries, dark chocolate and tobacco leaf, with that signature streak of green pepper and tannins soft as silk. Pour it with a charcoal ribeye and chimichurri, slow-roast lamb, or pork belly with salsa verde and the herby, smoky side of the wine comes alive, all for under twenty quid. This is The Full Bottle, the deeper story behind Episode 13 of Tasting Every Grape Variety, my mission to drink my way through all 10,000 grapes on earth. Subscribe and follow along. 🍇
