Are single-varietal wines better than blends? Are blends bad?

No and no. At least, not necessarily. There’s a common misconception floating around that mono-varietal or single-varietal wines are better quality than wines that are blends, and part of this stems from the confusion around what to call certain wines. Truth is, there’s no real, measurable correlation in quality based on whether a wine is single-varietal or a blend. Some of the “best” wines in the world are blends and so are some of the worst wines in the world. The same is true for single-varietal wines — they comprise some of the best wines in the world and also some of the worst. So what’s the deal then between single-varietal wines and blends?

Really, it just depends on the wine culture in the place that you’re in. Some parts of the world have been making wine by blending different varietals for decades; other parts of the world have been making wine with a single varietal for decades. Neither is better or worse than the other — what matters a lot more is everything else about the viticulture and winemaking process. Ultimately, if you have good quality grapes, it doesn’t really matter whether they are from different varietals or all from the same.

There are parts of Austria, where blending is so deeply rooted in the winemaking culture, that they even blend the grapes during harvest itself and then co-ferment the wines. Typically, blends are made by blending finished wines together to achieve the taste you want — it’s much rarer to blend grapes in the fields because you then have much less control over the taste of the resulting wine. This style is known as a field blend or as Gemiscther Satz in Austria, and proponents and makers of it argue that it’s more expressive of terroir (if you don’t know what terroir means, follow along for a post coming soon on that topic) than other types of wines because it more naturally represents the land from which the wine comes from by “controlling” for the variable of varietal.

We tend to assume single-varietal wines are better because of the heuristic we’re used to for the naming of wines here in the U.S. There’s nothing “wrong” with how we’re used to thinking about wines, it’s just wrong that we extrapolate based on that thinking. Both blends and single-varietal wines have equal potential to be good or bad; what matters most is the quality of the grapes — whether the same type of grape or 5 different ones.