In the middle of a geeky phase of wine study, I once visited a generous friend with a well stocked cellar who brought out three Bordeaux from different appellations so I could guess which was which when presented with unidentified glasses of wine. I was very pleased with myself. Then someone else handed me a glass to see if I could duplicate my results. And I was stumped! Why had the wine changed so much? I reasoned, I talked it through, I made a guess. Then the friend confessed he had mixed two of the wines. Touché.
Most wines are blends in one way or another. Either wines made from different grapes have been blended (as in a traditional blend such as Côtes du Rhône), or same wines that have been given different treatments are combined to create a final blend (an example would be a single-vineyard Chardonnay, some of which has been aged in oak and some in stainless steel, to achieve a final Chardonnay with a subtler oak presence). But these wines are blended in the cellar by a winemaker.
I’m talking about self-mixology. You might think this is sacrilege, but who says that what comes in the bottle is perfectly tailored to you? Some people add sparkling water, or ice. Others suffer through a wine with too much tannin for their taste, or one that’s sweeter than they’d like.
A few nights ago after a tasting, I was looking for something to sip and enjoy. But the tasting was of Bordeaux reds—not always the most sippable wines without food. One of the wines, a Lalande de Pomerol, was very light-bodied, almost watery, lacking structure but with decent flavor. On the other end of the spectrum was a Cru Bourgeois Superieur from the Haut-Médoc, a cabernet-based wine that was impressively intense, but too tannic for sipping. I added a dash of it to the weaker wine and came up with something reasonable and fairly pleasing.
The “rules” of DIY blending are to combine only same-grape wines or wines that are commonly blended by the winemaker, such as Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon, or Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. It doesn’t always work out, but sometimes the best of two options is to create a third.
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