Carménère

Carménère was one of the six permitted grapes of Bordeaux and was widely planted in the Médoc before phylloxera. It was never successfully replanted there — it ripens very late and sets fruit unreliably in Bordeaux's climate — and by the twentieth century it was considered effectively extinct in France.

It was not extinct. Cuttings taken to Chile in the 1850s, before the phylloxera epidemic, had been planted alongside Merlot and, because the two look similar in the vineyard, the difference was never noticed. For well over a century Chile's Merlot was substantially Carménère. The mistake was identified in 1994 by a French ampelographer visiting the country, and confirmed by DNA soon after.

Chile suits it precisely because the growing season is long, dry and reliably warm, so a variety that ripens two to three weeks after Merlot has time to finish.

The wine is deeply coloured with blackberry, black plum and black cherry, supple tannins and moderate acidity. Its signature is a green, savoury note — bell pepper, soy, black olive, tomato leaf — that comes from pyrazines and that becomes unpleasantly vegetal when the fruit is picked early. Fully ripe, it reads as an attractive savoury complexity.

The country has built a national identity around it, and it is now Chile's flagship variety.

It is also grown in small quantities in northern Italy, where much of what was labelled Cabernet Franc turned out on testing to be Carménère.