4 Common Grapes for Red Wines

Gamay
The grape famous for one wine: Beaujolais. No other region makes gamay with the same fresh intensity and the lively, sappy, strawberry fruit achieved in the granitic hills of Beaujolais. Just to the north of Beaujolais, in the Maconnais, gamay is the grape behind most (rather dull) red Macon and some basic Bourgogne Rouge. It also appears in Bourgogne Passe-Tout-Grains, a blend with pinot noir that finds its echo in Switzerland's Dole. In and around the Loire Valley, it produces such wines as Gamay de Touraine, Coteaux du Giennois, Cotes du Forez, and Cote Roannaise. Wines labeled gamay in eastern Europe and California are usually, respectively, blaufrankisch and pinot noir.

Grenache
Until a few years ago, the world's most widely planted red grape, grenache, was not a name seen much on labels. If people had heard of it, it was usually as the most important of the 13 grape varieties that are permitted, but rarely all used, in Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Grenache found favor in the late 1990s, when full-bodied red wines with spicy, ripe fruit became fashionable. Not that all grenache - or garnacha in Spain, where it is even more important than in the south of France - has this character, or the signature raspberry and white pepper flavors. Young grenache vines, and vines allowed to overproduce, give high-alcohol but pallid wines. Both Australia and California grow it on a large scale for cheap, high-volume wines; but, in Australia especially, old grenache vines are now being diverted to the production of big, fruity, characterful reds. Grenache is also a good variety for rose, or rosado.

Malbec
Like syrah/shiraz and grenache, malbec is a grape variety on a roll. At least, it is in its adopted country of Argentina. In Argentina, and on a much smaller scale also in Chile, malbec produces full, richly fruity, spicy reds with flavors of mulberries and blackberries. In its native Cahors in southwest France, it is better known for harder, leaner wines with dry tannins, higher acid, a mineral, pencil-shavings character, and restrained blackberry fruit. Small amounts of malbec are still used in Bordeaux and other reds from the French southwest, and a few Californian winemakers incorporate it in their Meritage wines (Bordeaux blends). Just recently, a handful of producers in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, have started to use malbec with more conviction in their - mostly merlot - blends, and with success.

Mourvedre
Called monastrell in Spain, the robust, dark-berried mourvedre has always been one of the key Spanish varieties; but it was little talked about under its French name in France or anywhere else until recently. Mourvedre was known, if at all, as the principal grape of the long-lived, but rather obscure, Provencal red wine Bandol, and as a bit-part player in a few other southern French reds. Its fortunes changed when it was recommended as one of several "improving varieties" throughout Languedoc-Roussillon, recognized for its firm-structured wines with their concentrated, gamey, leathery, black-fruit flavors. As mataro, it languished on the sidelines in California and Australia for many years; but, since Rhone grapes and other southern French varieties have become the vogue, mataro has been rehabilitated as sought-after mourvedre.