If you’ve watched the film Sideways, it will come as no surprise to hear that Merlot has spent a significant proportion of the past 22 years being mocked as a moderate, middle-of-the-road and safe wine, unless it's blended with more noble grape varieties or comes from a specific high quality and rarified site. This has led to relatively few low priced, stand-alone varietal expressions of Merlot, at least in the Southern Hemisphere, where it is seen as a safe bet. If you haven’t seen Sideways (released in 2004), its main protagonist, Miles (a depressed writer) was down on Merlot but loved Pinot Noir. This has had a damaging impact on lower to medium priced Merlots and has been dubbed the Sideways effect. 

It’s been real for those looking to make or buy a decent bottle of Merlot at an affordable price but times are changing, as an exceptionally good bottle showed me this week. 

The wine in question is an Australian Merlot from Taylors in the Clare Valley, tasted with Justin Taylor (from this family owned winery) and winemaker Adam Eggins in an online session – we were in three different places, all tasting the same wines. 

We dived into six reds from Taylors, focussing on Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Shiraz. The Cabernet and Shiraz were structured, powerful and impressive, offering plenty of food for thought, as expected, but the Merlot blew me away for being so unexpectedly bold in colour and taste. Its deep ruby hue was the first surprise, offering an impressively deep colour from its core to its rim. Its flavours were likewise impressively powerful, evoking warmth and ripe fruit with structure - along with a ‘wow – I wasn’t expecting that’ from the first sip. 

“The 2024 vintage was a stunner,” says winemaker Adam Eggins. “Totally blew us out of the water especially after 2023, which was one of those cool and challenging years.”

This makes the 2024 Taylors Estate Merlot something of an unexpectedly commanding wine at a seemingly ridiculously low price tag with an RRP of $17.99. It’s also a blend but not in the typical fashion in which Merlot is blended with more tannic grape varieties (most notably Cabernet Sauvignon) but a regional blend. In this case, Merlot grapes from the continental climate of the Clare Valley (about 70+kms north of Barossa Valley) and the cool maritime climate of the Limestone Coast in Coonawarra. Both are in South Australia. Both bring exceptionally different characters and complexities to the wine, enabling not only a greater flavour spectrum but the ability for winemakers to hedge their bets in challenging vintage conditions. And even in the relatively reliably warm and dry climate of South Australia, there are tough years, ‘interesting’ years and good to great years. 

Eggins uses two to four year old American oak as the winery’s base position for this wine, bringing French oak into the equation for the winery’s more premium blends where Merlot adds its classic fleshy qualities to Cabernet Sauvignon's refined bony structure. 

“American oak can give you mouthfeel and softness but it doesn’t have the same shape as French oak, which is often tucked into Cabernet Sauvignon’s powerfully tannic structure.”

There’s a new Merlot in the Taylors range and it’s tailored to the New Zealand market only, at this stage. Bearing the ‘Taylors Reserve Parcel Merlot’ label, it also comes from 2024 and will cost slightly more at RRP $25. The idea is to create a bigger, denser, more structural red wine and to show that a relatively serious take on the Australian Merlot theme is do-able. This wine does all that, offering more structure than its little sibling. Both are impressive and beg the question: how do they do it for these prices? 

We may never know what inspired Sideways writer Rex Pickett to pick on Merlot for Miles to hate but the world definitely caught a cold from the impact of his character Miles' detesting it. 

It seems that we've all recovered from that sniffle, though, and 22 years later, both new and older generations are looking for high quality expressions of Merlot, both when it's blended and as a stand-alone grape variety. And at affordable prices rather than the stratospheric ones of the world's greatest expressions of Merlot - which are a story for another time. 

 2024 Taylors Estate Merlot Clare Valley / Limestone Coast RRP $17.99

Using two to four year old American oak and grapes from the warm, dry, 'Indian summer' of 2024 in South Australia, this Merlot offers a power packed punch in the glass. From its deep ruby hue to its impressive dark berry flavours, this is Merlot standing up for itself as a worthy expression of a noble grape variety that has its own flesh, structured smooth tannins and even a welcome complex range of spicy notes on the finish.   

Blended beauty

2024 Craggy Range Te Kahu RRP $34.99

Merlot brings deliciousness to this complex blend, leading the way, with smaller volumes of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot. Dark in colour with a gentle smoky edge in aroma, it offers exceptional depth of flavour in a medium bodied wine from a very good vintage in Hawke's Bay's Gimblett Gravels. 

Te Kahu also offers great value for money, especially for lovers of Bordeaux-styled red wines.