In the May 15th, 1989 issue of The Wine Spectator, a letter to the Editor was printed , in which I wrote: "As an eager and somewhat overconfident participant in the recent competition to coin a marketing term for California's proliferating Bordeaux-style blends, I could hardly wait to get the March 31st issue of The Wine Spectator to discover the results. While I did expect to be notified sooner of my victory, I naturally chalked the delay up to the usual bureaucratic waffling."

"Visons of case upon case of premium California wine pouring into my home began to well up before me as I tore through the pages, frantically seeking the 'mot clef' of my own device.

Then behold "Meritage". Meritage!? Aghast, I flipped back and forth in search of the accompanying promo for the latest in low-tar cigarettes, only to find that my worst fears had been realized. Madison Avenue could not have disallusioned me more.

Sour grapes, you say? Assuredly, though my congratulations go out to [the winner] and his insight into the folly of the association. May he savor every last drop of his ill-named booty.

Just one question remains. If in a year's time Meritage goes the way of all ill-conceived slogans, will you run another contest so I can try out my latest batch of neologisms?"

That was 16 years and some months ago, and clearly I was not prescient. But though the term has stuck around, even perhaps gaining some ground in the past couple of years among collectors of a certain ilk, in spite of my best efforts to ignore it, I still have to wonder if the original sponsors of the term feel they have accomplished all they had set out to do.

To be more specific, the term was intended from the start to be an American-sounding name which would pay homage to participating estates' top wines, red or white, which had been blended according to the stylistic dictates of the great wines of Bordeaux. So why, then, is the word so much more frequently pronounced Meri-tahj' (accent on the second syllable, sounds like Hermitage, to which it bears no relation whatsoever), than Mer'-itage (rhymes with Heritage, accent on the first, and connotes some special merit)? Has this linguistic juggernaut served to clarify the issue of tradition and style. or merely muddied it? And how many of us even recognize that white wines of a certain construct were also encouraged to join the ranks of Meritage bottles?

The Meritage Association was founded back in 1988 by a group of forward-thinking vintners who were challenged with the problem of promoting their top wines when California's 75% rule eschewed the notion of blending varietals in favor of the tyranny of the single variety wine. The term "Reserve" had been badly coopted by inferior producers of undistinguished wines for years, and so the use of that word was viewed as largely devalued as well. "Meritage", then, was their answer to a cry for the oenologic freedom to produce the best wine possible using the age-old art of blending.

How do we measure their success? Well, the Association still exists, as a visit to their website will confirm. Membership is up from a low of about 22 estates a mere six years ago to over 120 today. Wines labelled with the term must not exceed a 25,000 case annual production, and must constitute each estate's most expensive, or second most expensive bottling. So in a sense, there's more guarantee of quality in reaching for a bottle of Meritage wine, than for a wine not labelled as such, though that's by no means assured (think Harlan Estate).

Ben Giliberti of the Washington Post wrote about a year ago that Meritage has become, in the final analysis, a kind of "quiet success". I concur, but feel that until consumers learn to pronounce the term as it was intended, without the French pretension and the fake accent, they'll be somewhat missing the point of the exercise. And to me that's something of a "disquieting success".