Last time we took a brief look at the history of Carménère, thanks to the Wines of Chile organization. When we left off, Chile was faced with the question of what to do with the fact that an estimated one-third of what had been thought to be Merlot was actually Carménère. Again, thanks to the Wines of Chile, here’s how they proceeded.
The first true bottle of Carménère to appear on the market in 1996 was the Carmen Grand Vidure 1994, made by the oenologist Álvaro Espinoza. Just two years earlier, it been harvested as a Merlot, also under the name Grande Vidure. One year later, the first officially designated Carménère appeared, a 1996 vintage from Viña Santa Inés. Though cautious at first, a growing number of Chilean wineries steadily became persuaded of Carménère’s potential as a flagship variety. In the 1990s, New World countries had embraced the concept of flagship single varieties such as Malbec in Argentina, Shiraz in Australia and Sauvignon Blanc in New Zealand.
Chile’s Servicio de Agricultura y Ganadería (Department of Agriculture & Livestock), which gathers and publishes wine industry statistics, unwittingly acted as a catalyst: for a wine to be labelled Carménère, it decreed that the entire vineyard had to be registered as planted with the variety. That decision, along with the enthusiasm of the wineries, led to a rapid expansion of the grape. The number of hectares planted to Carménère increased rapidly, peaking in 2014 with a record planting of 13,750 hectares (almost 34,000 acres), a number that would later stabilize at the current figure of 10,332 hectares (around 25,500 acres) in 2021. This means that today, old-vines Chilean Carménère, some planted as far back as 80 years ago, sit side by side with new vines in the same regions – with a handful still labelled Merlot!
In the process, Carménère rose from near worldwide oblivion following the phylloxera crisis that swept through the Médoc to representing a country on the global stage: Carménère became synonymous with Chile.
Next time, in the third part of this overview of Carménère, we’ll look a a few fun fact of this interesting grape that is now synonymous with Chile.