-Miles, from the film Sideways

As much as we might want every wine to be Lafite, the truth that is wine is the story of the good, the bad and the ugly. Just as every episode of “Gilligan’s Island” isn’t Shakespeare’s The Tempest, very few wines ever approach greatness.

But sometimes you just want a glass of wine to have at your barbie. That’s where merlot kicks in. In the early ’90s, a “60 Minutes” report on the French paradox – how drinking moderate amounts of red wine can lower incidence of heart disease – transformed wine drinking forever.

The first hero of this movement was merlot. Merlot is most commonly used as a blending grape for cabernet sauvignon. Known for softening the aggressive nature of cabernet and adding aromatics, merlot has silkier tannins. It is the most common grape grown in Bordeaux. With very few exceptions, merlot benefits from blending just as much as cabernet sauvignon, and is often blended with cabernet and its kissing cousin, cabernet franc. It is an easier drinking wine, and easy to pronounce, which is a huge asset when you’re trying to impress a doe-eyed date.

How did merlot madness become merlot sadness? Years ago when merlot took off, wineries started to graft over vines to produce merlot. And the new-world merlot from California, Australia and Chile were safe, easy drinking wines – soft, round and incredibly boring. Winemakers were producing inoffensive wines, not interesting ones. New-world winemakers still live in the shadow of the great French wine industry. Like a kid brother with an inferiority complex, it tries to imitate its big brother.

Get over it! New-world wines just taste different, even if you use the same grapes, because of its terrior – its sense of place. Last time I looked at a map, Napa Valley wasn’t in France. Viva la difference.

The Italians have been making very interesting merlots, blending with the great chianti grape, sangiovese. The Spanish have been using American oak barrels to give merlot a creamy, vanilla flavor. Wineries don’t have to imitate the French – you can blend with different grapes like sangiovese and the great Spanish grape tempranillo to give the wines a different flavor profile. New-world winemakers just have to be more creative in their blends and their barrel programs.

Last year, I was talking with a winemaker from Argentina, whose name escapes me, who told me that he was trained in France and that he was glad he was not working in Bordeaux: They were too restrictive in what you could blend, because French regulations prohibit blending merlot with syrah, for example. Even if it made a better wine, you could only blend with the traditional Bordeaux varietals: cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot, malbec and petit verdeaux. In Argentina no such restrictions apply; the same here in California. So why put on a straight jacket?

Merlot is not going the way of the hula-hoop, the pet rock and streaking. Chateau Cheval-Blanc and Chateau Petrus are two of the greatest wines in the world, and both are merlot-based. In California, Duckhorn, Twomey and Havens are close to classic.

Then there’s ABC – anything but chardonnay. The movement is basically the same as with merlot; white wine drinkers are sick of fat, sweet, buttery, tropical fruit chards that are over-oaked. The wines are so low on acid that they’re almost incompatible with food.

A lot of white wine drinkers have switched to viognier, pinot grigio and sauvignon blanc. But chards are making a comeback as more winemakers avoid over-oaking, fermenting in steel and aging in neutral oak. And the wines are letting the acids express themselves like classic white burgundy. Chardonnay is coming back.

Two-buck Chuck, Charles Shaw wine, is made by Classic Wines, the former owners of Franzia, who at one time were one of the largest box wine producers. Franzia got out of the 5-liter box wine production and started producing cork finish wines. Their labels also include Forestville and Mount Peller, among others. Box wines in general are not the most natural wines in the world; they use flavor enhancers and add hard ciders like apple and pear to the blend.

My mama told me that if it smells like box wine, looks like box wine and tastes like box wine, then it is box wine, even if it comes out of a bottle. Sometimes in the wine biz, the emperor has no clothes. I see customers coming out of Trader Joe’s with cases of two-buck Chuck – the same people that would turn up their noses if you served a glass of Almaden box merlot. How ironic.

A couple of years ago at a Vons wine steward meeting, a dozen of us tried all the Charles Shaw wines. All the red wines tasted like each other. The merlot tasted like the cabernet, which tasted like the pinot noir, which tasted like the shiraz and so forth. This caused much laughter – it was as if the wines came from the same spigot.

Pinot noir is very much the rage until some pop diva like Britney Spears says pinot noir is yucky. Tune in next time for the next wine fad.