Wine: Good grapes don't die - they just emigrate

The vine was once one of Bordeaux's most treasured varieties – fruity as Merlot, but with more tannin – and was combined with Cabernet Franc to make some of the Medoc's best wine in the early 19th century.

Then disease struck, and it was forced underground. Why? In some ways, the grape was the victim of the steam age. Around the mid-19th century, transatlantic transport became fast enough to allow root-destroying phylloxera aphids to arrive in Europe alive after a sea voyage. Attacking the root systems of vineyards, phylloxera decimated Europe's vines, destroying almost half of them.

A solution was eventually found: growers grafted European varieties onto the hardier, phylloxera-resistant stumps of American wild vines. This sleight of hand spared Europe from having to drink wines made from the rough, foxy-tasting American vines themselves, but it wasn't enough to save Carmenère. Always prone to rot, the variety was so decimated it was not replanted and soon disappeared from sight.

Or did it? Despite a century of obscurity, the variety turned up alive and well in the early '90s. Much like various unsavoury characters from Nazi Germany, it had been lying low in Chile for decades, living under a false name and denying its past. Mistaken for the similar Merlot, it became one of the country's main specialities before being unmasked 16 years ago.

While Merlot and Carmenère's qualities are similar, they look and taste subtly different. Merlot bunches ripen earlier and dangle a long, pendulous tentacle of grapes below each cluster, while bunches of Carmenère grapes are generally more pert and dense. While both have mint and herb flavours, Carmenère wines recall black fruit like plums and blackberries rather than the strawberry and raspberry hints of Merlot, while they are also darker and have a slightly more astringent pucker to them.

In many ways, Carmenère's transplantations from Bordeaux to Chile made sense: with the latter's warmer, drier weather, the grape ripens better and is less prone to rot. These fresh tasting, fruit-forward Chilean wines don't have the sophistication or complexity of their better Bordeaux counterparts (though some Bordeaux subsections are, of course, happy churning out cheap plonk) and are best drunk reasonably young.

At the cheaper end, the Mont Gras Carmenère Reserva 2009, available at Waitrose for £5.69, is a good wine to try out the grape with. Nine months' ageing in new oak highlights the wine's sweet spice, with cinnamon, cloves and a faint drop of vanilla partially masking, but not obscuring, a taste of blackberry, plum and prune.

One step up is the 2007 Chono Carmenère, Maipo Valley, sold by Berry Brothers and Rudd for £9.15. With 10 months of oak ageing and a 5 per cent dose of Cabernet Franc to boost its aroma, it has a herby, leafy flavour that combines with the wine's plum and blackcurrant flavours well enough to make you happy the variety is back in town for good.