What is Blended Wine? In today’s video, we are talking about blends. I’m going to lean more towards red blends because that’s slightly more popular, but whatever I am saying today also does apply to white blends.

Multiple Grape Varieties in One Bottle

What is a blended wine, you’re asking? That’s when a winemaker takes more than one grape variety and mixes them together. This red white blend is something as opposed to a Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay. When you see those words on the bottle, it means that the wine is primarily made out of one grape varietal.

When you don’t see a specific grape name or you see the words “red blend” or “table wine”, that indicates the winemaker has used a variety of grapes and blended them together to make a blended wine. Currently, blends are the fastest growing category of wine in the U.S. More people are discovering them and finding the blends that fit their palates. One of the reasons behind this is that when the winemakers can blend the different grapes together, they can find a product that better fits people’s palates and better fits your personal taste, more so than just working with the one wine grape.

A Bad Rep for Blends

On the other side, there are still many people put off by blends because they are looking for a varietal. A varietal is a wine made of one specific grape variety. For a long time, varietals took over as the wine to drink. The blends were thought to be made with the leftover grapes. That sentiment is not necessarily true; ever or especially now.

Even in wines labeled as a single grape, the winemaker often still blends in a little bit of other grapes. This is done to help balance out the wine. It is not very much, but they’re still blended. With the blended wines, you’ll find all different grapes used in different blends. You’ll have your Syrah, Cabernet, Grenache, Pinot Noirs. You’ll have your Cabernets, Merlot, Petite Verdot. When you see the grapes listed on the wine bottle they work like food ingredients. The first grape listed will be the grape that has the most quantity in the blend. Some blends get into specifics, they’ll give you the exact percentage of the grapes that they’re using, while some won’t tell you at all what grapes they’re using.

When you start finding a blend of grapes that you like, you can look at some of the other blends in the rack or talk to the person at your local wine shop and let them know what you like and what you didn’t like. You can even share what specifically you liked about the wine and what you didn’t like about it. Then very often, we can help you find another blend that might fit your taste buds or steer you clear of something that you might not like.

What is Blended Wine?

To summarize what is blended wine: It’s when a winemaker takes a bunch of different grape varieties and blends them together and makes wine out of them. It’s important to remember that even the wines that have a varietal name on the bottle are sometimes blended as well. Don’t think of them as superior or better than just the common red blend. In fact, when you go back in history to Bordeaux and Chianti and some of the top winemaking regions in the world they have been blending grapes for thousands of years. That’s how they make their wine. The idea of even putting the specific single grape variety on the label was something that was fairly, recently done, mostly in the U.S. Those blends from Bordeaux, Chianti, Tuscany, those are still primarily blended wines. If they were made in the U.S., we would be calling them red blends.

Hope you enjoyed this video. We look forward to your comments and your feedback and we really look forward to more questions so that we can keep addressing them and keep you entertained. Thanks for watching.

If you enjoyed this video, you may want to check out one of our previous posts.