The Inside Track to the Next Hot Grape

We all know Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. But what are the hot new wine grapes? Which varietals are canny importers seeking out? What do wine professionals swoon over in private?

Around the world, Viognier has touched a nerve. Found until recently on only a few acres of vineyard in the northern Rho^ne valley in southeast France, this headily scented grape has been planted at a remarkable rate throughout southern France. It’s also grown here and there in California and worn as a badge of wine-producing chic from Chile to South Africa to Australia.

The wines, smelling of dried apricots, should be full-bodied yet nervy--a trick few of them achieve (although Calera Vineyards usually manages it, despite sky-high alcohol levels). Too many Viogniers, especially from young vines, just taste like liquid air freshener.

The northern Rho^ne has yielded two more fashionable white wine grapes, known as ingredients in white Hermitage: the racily perfumed Roussanne and the heavier, marzipan-like Marsanne. Some seriously deep-flavored Roussanne is produced in southern France (especially at Cha^teau de Beaucastel in Cha^teauneuf-du-Pape), while the Australian state of Victoria is making much of its old Marsanne vines.

The great sweep of vines around the French Mediterranean coast, the area of Languedoc-Roussillon, harbors all sorts of grape varieties, occasionally ancient and often fascinating.

Grenache Blanc can easily make a flabby wine, but it’s full-bodied and useful for matching with highly spiced foods. The tangy, delicate Vermentino grown in Sardinia is probably the same as the Rolle of Provence, an issue that makes our grape-nut hearts beat faster. Picpoul is the lemon-scented specialty of the village of Pinet, and mineral-flavored Terret is so ancient it has mutated to give us Blanc, Gris and Noir (white, pink and black berried) forms.

Such wines, even from top domaines, are rarely expensive. The big Vins de Pays d’Oc producers Fortant de France and Reserve St. Martin are busy bottling examples, ranging from inoffensive to exciting, of these and other Rho^ne varietals.

They are also trying to interest us in Chasan, but that’s a relatively recent and decidedly expedient crossing of Chardonnay with Listan (a.k.a. Palomino), the Sherry grape. The chief virtue of Chasan, however, is not flavor but the commercial allure of the first three letters of its name.

Italy, especially southern Italy, has a host of great but underappreciated grapes, both red and white, but it will take time and tenacious importers to fully expose them to the outside world. It can be done, though. Witness the way the Piedmont’s pear-scented Arneis has been saved from extinction.

For years, it has seemed that the Italians have done all they can to persuade us that Pinot Grigio is a boring grape, perhaps to satisfy consumers’ need for something not too challenging or the wine trade’s desire for big yields to boost their profits. Someday, however, we may see more Italian Pinot Grigio that displays the daring density of its cousin from Alsace, Pinot Gris.

This is a grape that could really catch on, a white wine for red-wine food, smelling of bacon fat and tropical fruit and calling for game or almost rank cheese on the plate. Oregon vintners, especially old-timer Eyrie and brash newcomer King Estate, are latching on to Pinot Gris with a vengeance, and the results are often more successful than Oregon vintners’ efforts with Chardonnay.

For the moment, we Italophiles can content ourselves with a small revival in the fortunes of the classical, much traveled grape Malvasia Bianca. It was traded around the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages from Greece to Spain and has since found its way to Madeira and California, where Bonny Doon sells one under the Ca’ del Solo label. However dry it is, the wine tends to taste slightly sweet, but nobly, classically so, with a certain ancient sheen.

Another grape with a long history that is strutting its stuff most dramatically in the New World is Verdelho. The vine is grown on Madeira and gives its name to one of the drier, longer-lived styles. Nowadays it’s responsible for vibrant, tangy, full-bodied Australian white table wines, particularly from some of the hotter vineyards of Western Australia.

Australia leads the field in the hot red of the moment, the Rho^ne Valley’s Syrah or, as the Australians call it, Shiraz. They have thousands of acres of this ancient vine (unlike California’s Rho^ne Rangers, who yearn for more) and can turn out all manner of styles, from chocolate-rich Barossa soups to peppery, nervy numbers from the higher vineyards of Victoria. It also makes a fine blend with Cabernet Sauvignon.

The fashion for Rho^ne styles is also apparent in some bottlings of the spicy, meaty grape that dominates the southern end of the region, Grenache. In California, Grenache may be associated with vapid sweet roses, but winemakers in northern Spain are just coming to grips with how good a wine they can make from low-yielding old vines of Garnacha (as they call Grenache).

Mourvedre is another extremely fashionable Rho^ne grape that probably originated in Spain. It’s known as Monastrell in Spain and Mataro in California and Australia. Many growers are rapidly renaming their Mataro Mourvedre in an attempt to give it French cachet, but in fact it is a decidedly un-suave grape, producing an intensely gamy, animal, full-blooded wine that is usually best blended with something a little more structured, like Syrah or Merlot.

And what, I hear you ask, will be the next Merlot? I put my money on its Bordeaux blending partner, Cabernet Franc. All over the wine world, from Washington state to New Zealand via Chile and Bordeaux, with all sorts of interesting stops en route, I hear growers and winemakers eulogizing the aromatic crispness of this cousin of Cabernet Sauvignon, a candidate, like Merlot, for delivering the thrill of Cabernet Sauvignon without the astringent pain, but one with a bit more finesse.

The grapes I think wine producers should be chasing is another matter.

Spain has some great white grapes, notably Albarin~o and Godello from the northwest corner, and many a grower elsewhere is already experimenting with Spain’s noble red Tempranillo, known as Tinto Fino in Ribera del Duero. The lean white Assyrtiko of Greece is clearly a grape to watch. South Africa’s rich red Pinotage can perform beautifully there. And Austria’s Gruner Veltliner can behave remarkably like dill-scented white Burgundy.

But these probably will remain local specialties for the moment. The two most underrated grapes in my view are also quite widely planted throughout the world, which may not be a coincidence.

Semillon makes sumptuous sweet wines such as Cha^teau d’Yquem as well as full-bodied, lemony dry whites for long aging in Bordeaux, the rest of southwest France and Australia. Washington’s Semillons are wonderfully gutsy dry whites, with far more character than the state’s generally insipid Chardonnays, and the grape could also do well in Chile, South Africa and New Zealand.

And then there’s aromatic, nervy Riesling. The great grape of Germany is capable of delivering tingling essences of place and can outlast any Chardonnay and follow very much the same aging pattern as a fine red Bordeaux.

Riesling is the true insider grape. When two or three wine professionals are gathered together, it’s a fair bet they will agree on the ethereal but underappreciated quality of Riesling at its best (mostly from Germany’s Mosel Valley, Austria’s Wachau and Alsace). Unfortunately, however, far too many Rieslings on sale today taste like particularly dull, stinky sugar-water, so making converts is difficult.

Never mind. All the more for us grape insiders.