Long before the movie "Sideways" made it hip to diss merlot, the wine industry had its own jaundiced view of this red grape variety from Bordeaux.

The Napa Valley's Louis M. Martini winery claims to have been the first American winery to make a varietal merlot, and that was sometime in the 1970s. Until then merlot was largely thought to produce an "incomplete" wine and was used exclusively for blending, typically to "soften" young cabernet sauvignons and m ...

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