In today's video, we talk about blends. 
Hi, I'm Tim from Elma Wine & Liquor.
In today's video, we're talking about blends.
I'm going to lean more towards red 
blends because that's slightly more
popular, but whatever I'm saying 
today also does apply to white ones. 
What is a blend, you're asking? 
That's when a winemaker takes 
more than one grape variety 
and mixes them
together to make wine. 
This red blend or white blend would
be something as opposed to a Cabernet 
Sauvignon or a Riesling 
or Chardonnay. When you see those words 
on the bottle, that means that the
wine is primarily made out of that 
one type of grape. When you don't 
see a specific grape name or you see 
the words red blend or table wine,
that indicates that the winemaker 
has used a variety of grapes 
and blended them together to make a wine. 
Currently, red blends and also white 
blends, to some extent, 
 is the fastest growing category
 of wine in the US.
More and more people are discovering
them and finding blends that fit
their palates the best. 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.
On the other side, there are still a
lot of people that come in 
and when we talk about red blends to
them, they get a little bit put off 
because they are looking for a 
Varietal. For a long time, 
Varietals took over as the wine that
you want to be drinking. 
The blends were made with the 
leftovers; the not good 
quality grapes. Whereas, the pure 
Varietal, when it says Cabernet 
or Chardonnay or something like that 
on it, that is where the quality 
wine was. That's not necessarily 
true, ever, or especially now. 
Even in those Varietals, 
when you see the word Cabernet 
Sauvignon on the wine bottle, a lot 
of times the winemaker still blends 
in a little bit, a couple percent, of 
this grape or that grape to help
balance out the wine. Less often than
not, even those Varietals are still 
a blend to some extent. It's not very 
much, but they're still blended, 
they still use some blending grapes 
in there. With the blends, 
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 
or on the winemaker's website, they
kind of work like food ingredients. 
The first grape you see, 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.
It's a little bit-- especially 
in those that can be challenging 
finding something comparable 
to what you like and building 
off of that. 
For a lot of them, 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 and even what 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 
a little bit better or steer you 
clear of something that you 
might not like. 
Basically, in summary what is a 
blend? 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 wine making 
regions in the world, those happen 
to be in Europe. They've been
blending grapes for thousands 
of years. That's how they've been 
making their wine. The idea of even 
putting a name, the specific single 
grape variety on the label was 
something that was fairly, recently 
done anyway, mostly in the US. 
Those blends from Bordeaux, Chianti, 
Tuscany, those are still primarily 
blended wines. If they 
were made in the US, we will be 
calling them red blends but it's 
because they're made in those famous 
region that they get to use those 
region's names on their labels, 
instead of simply saying red blend. 
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. Look forward to 
hear your feedback. 
Cheers.
