Semillon: The Grape Named After a Town That Doesn’t Want It

Three hundred years of being called the wrong thing — and still one of the great whites.

Kia ora koutoa katoa, fellow wine explorers.

Someone asked me a while back which wine I hadn’t touched in years. I didn’t have to think about it.

Semillon. I know… it almost spelt my first name.

Not a decision. It just slipped off the table, the way things do. So I went looking for it.

And what I found wasn’t a tasting note. It was a grape that’s spent three hundred years being called the wrong thing. I remember clearly discussing this in one of my classes in Dijon,

Say it the way they said it

seh-mee-YON, in France. Soft on the end.

SEM-ill-on, in Australia. Flat, both L’s, no apology.

Both right. Depends which country you’re standing in.

Now, where the name comes from. In Bordeaux in 1736, somebody wrote it down as Sémillon de Saint-Émilion.

Saint-Émilion. The town.

Say the town’s name the way the old Bordeaux locals said it. Fast. Run together. Swallowed at the front.

S’Émillon.

That’s it. That’s the whole story of the name. The grape isn’t named after the town. It’s named after the sound of people saying the town’s name.

A mumble that hardened into a name. Three centuries on, it’s on labels around the world. Crazy right?

And the town grows none of it

Saint-Émilion today is a red wine appellation. Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon. That’s the list.

Plant Semillon there and make a white, and you are not allowed to put the town’s name on the bottle. It gets declassified down to plain Bordeaux Blanc.

And this is no sleepy village. Saint-Émilion has made wine since Roman times, and in 1999 became the first wine landscape in the world named a UNESCO World Heritage site.

A town that serious about its identity. And no room in it for the grape wearing its name.

Meanwhile Semillon crossed the river to Graves and Sauternes and made Château d’Yquem, perhaps the most famous white wine on earth.

Right name. Wrong town. Greatest result.

Then it gave the name away

It gets better.

Go to Cognac. The grape behind around ninety percent of everything they distil is an Italian one, Ugni Blanc.

Its French name? Saint-Émilion.

So that one town’s name now sits on a red appellation that grows neither grape, on an Italian white in Cognac, and buried inside the word Semillon on a Bordeaux white that left home.

One name. Three grapes. None of them living there.

And the mistaken identity followed it everywhere.

In South Africa they didn’t even call it Semillon. They called it Wyndruif the wine grape because in the 1800s it was ninety percent of everything planted at the Cape.

In Australia they sold it for a century and a half as “Hunter River Riesling.” It isn’t Riesling. It has never been Riesling. They only put it right around 1982.

A grape that spent three hundred years being called something it wasn’t and made great wine anyway.

Where it finally became itself

The Hunter Valley, north of Sydney. Hot. Humid. The rain arrives exactly when you want to be picking.

On paper, a terrible place to grow white wine. But they make it their own and expresses elegantly.

So, they pick early. Around 10 to 11 percent alcohol, the lowest harvest of any serious dry white in the world. Then they do almost nothing to it. No oak. Stainless steel. Bottled inside six months.

Open one young and it gives you very little. Lemon pith. Green apple. A bit stern.

Leave it ten years and it turns to toast, beeswax and honey.

It tastes oaked. It has never seen a barrel. That isn’t winemaking. That’s just time.

Jancis Robinson calls it Australia’s unique gift to the wine world. A gift out of a place that made everything difficult.

Hard ground. Hard season. Great wine.

How to buy one

1. Look for Hunter Valley on the label. Tyrrell’s, Mount Pleasant, Brokenwood, Thomas Wines. Here in New Zealand you’ll find them at a decent independent rather than the supermarket.
2. Check the alcohol before anything else. If it says 10.5 or 11 percent, you’ve got the real thing. That low number is the style, not a weakness.
3. Buy two — one young, one old. A current release and one with ten or more years on it. Open them side by side. You’ll watch time do the work, in one sitting.
4. Aged white is the bargain nobody talks about. A fifteen-year-old Hunter Semillon often costs less than a three-year-old Chardonnay. Nothing else with that much age is that cheap.

Chill it properly. Fish, scallops, anything out of the sea. It was made for our table without ever knowing it.

Wine Chief rule: when a white is under 11 percent and over ten years old, buy it. That isn’t a weak wine. That’s a patient one.

The last pour

We spend a lot of time worrying about saying wine names correctly.

Here’s a grape that’s been mispronounced, mislabelled, exiled from its own town and had its name handed to a stranger. It still made Château d’Yquem. It still made the longest-living white in Australia.

Nobody got its name right. It got the wine right.

So if you stumble over a word on a label this weekend, let it go.

Say it wrong. Pour it anyway.

Mālō ’aupito,

Semisi Telefoni — The Wine Chief