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| Baga |
The grape of the Portuguese Bairrada region, common also in Dão and many other parts of Portugal. Its thick skins yield very dark colour and high tannin, bitter if under-ripe, or if the winemaking is old fashioned. Made in a modern way, it can be firm but rich and duskily fragrant. |
| Barbera |
Italy's most common red grape, making fairly light-bodied reds to be drunk young, with sweet-sour plum-skin flavour, high acidity and a bit of tannin, or, with some new oak ageing, wines with a bit more body. Rounder, softer ones come from Argentina and California. |
| Blauer Zweigelt |
Sometimes simply called Zweigelt, this Austrian grape makes soft, easy-going red wine with juicy cherry fruit. |
| Bonarda |
Two different grapes go under this name in northern Italy, both making light, easy, rather nondescript wines. Italian emigrants took one of them to Argentina, where it has become more important, making slightly sturdier, rustic wines that are good to blend with more aromatic varieties. |
| Cabernet Franc |
This is one of the Bordeaux bunch of red grapes, along with Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Petit Verdot. Its wines are always fairly light, with medium to highish acidity. In cooler years, it makes off-puttingly grassy-flavoured wines; in good years it can make reds with a ripe raspberry aroma and chocolatey depth that can mature into spicy, long-lived, savoury complexity. Cabernet Franc is often responsible for a grassy, flowery overtone in red Bordeaux blends. It is used more on the Right Bank (including St-Emilion and Pomerol) than on the Left (the Médoc). It is often included elsewhere in the world in Bordeaux-style blends. Cabernet Franc sometimes stars on its own, too. It is the red grape of most of the red wines of the Loire, including Chinon, and makes inexpensive light, grassy reds in northern Italy. There are occasional richer, riper, expensive examples from hotter places such as Chile. |
| Cabernet Sauvignon |
Cabernet Sauvignon has become the world's most travelled red vine without a whisper of competition. The grape that gives flavours from grassy to ripe blackcurrant in red Bordeaux can come up with plum, blackcurrant, raisin, mint, eucalyptus, green pepper and tar in sunnier climes. In Bordeaux it is always blended, with Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Petit Verdot, to make mid-weight reds with medium acidity and tannin. Elsewhere, Cabernet Sauvignon is often used alone, or blended with other Bordeaux grapes to give more complexity, or with local varieties to bring added character. Cabernet Sauvignon has a phenomenal ageing ability, developing cedary, tarry flavours in bottle, and fading elegantly into graceful old age. |
| Carignan/Cariñena |
There are two sides to this grape, which originated in Spain, spread across the south of France and migrated to the USA and a little to Chile and South Africa. Young vines, cropping heavily, make rather astringent plonk, OK for very cheap French vin de table or California jug wine, distinguished only by its deep colour and lots of alcohol. But old vines, with low yields, can make sophisticated, rich reds, with smoky, mulberry fruit. The famous source of such Cariñena in Spain is Priorato, near Barcelona. |
| Carmenère |
Once common in Bordeaux but abandoned because prone to disease in the damp climate, Carmenère was exported to Chile, where it somehow got mis-identified as Merlot. Some Chilean Carmenère is still accidentally labelled as 'Merlot'. Nowadays, however, Carmenère is more highly prized in Chile than Merlot, as more intensely flavoured, and smoother, with green peppery and chocolate flavours, more akin to a soft Cabernet. We are going to see more Carmenère. |
| Cinsault/Cinsaut |
These vines produce large volumes of unremarkable wines. It is now much less important than it used to be, both in France and in South Africa. Cinsault is sometimes blended with other, more flavourful grapes. |
| Dolcetto |
Dolcetto makes brightly fruity reds in the Piemonte mountains of north east Italy. They have intense, fresh plum flavours. Most are light, easy wines, best drunk young. The best, most intense ones are sometimes oak aged and can be matured for several years. A little is planted in Australia. |
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