Merlot is a mercurial grape: it can produce a red-fruit forward wine (think strawberries) or one heavy in the direction of black, like black plums. To some extent, it very much depends upon whimsical Mother Nature: when she blows cold, you usually can expect the former; when she is a bit hot under the collar, she engenders blackberry and black plum notes. The year 2014 must have been more of the latter than the former in Bordeaux, as this wine from Clos Sainte-Anne that bears the Hotel Okura’s name has black fruit notes. The ABV is 13%, and it is food friendly. We consumed it with pistachio nuts. Nice, indeed.
Merlot may be a fitting wine for Tokyo because the name “Merlot was given to this variety because the blackbird likes this grape very much.”1 This derivation may not be a certainty but, according to the same source, it is the “most convincing hypothesis.” Tokyo has had a problem with a black bird of a different species for a number of decades now—the crow, an intelligent avian that is seemingly in a state of perpetual war with the human, canine, and feline inhabitants of the metropolis.
1Robinson, J. et al. Wine Grapes (UK: Penguin Books, 2012).
*Hendrick Goltzius – Mauritshuis, Netherlands – Public Domain.
https://www.europeana.eu/item/2021672/resource_document_mauritshuis_4
Drinking Japan 