New red grape variety to me?

I see the new 2008 O'Shaughnessy Howell Mt. Cab. is made up of mostly Cabernet Sauvignon but the other 6 varietys include St. Macaire. Can someone clue me in on this new-to-me variety?

Here is some info but rather spotty I am afraid to say!

http://www.vinodiversity.com/st-macaire-wine.html

Interesting. St. Macaire is IN Bordeaux, so that is a good indication the grape variety was either widely planted there or was known to be from there.

Difficult to tell with all the name/dialect/regional confusion over the years. Carmenere (which was almost willfully forgotten) is also Grande Vidure, as opposed to Petite Vidure, which was another name for Cabernet Franc. Just as Gros Verdot (another obscure ancien apparently) was the counterpart of Petit Verdot.

With an area as vast as Bordeaux, that encompasses so many different wine regions, geographies, cultures, and styles, you have to figure there would be an awful lot of variation in varieties that sort of got eliminated along the way by homogenization.

In Calistoga, California the grape might have been confused for Barbera, hence the synonym “Calistoga Barbera”.

Salute

Hi Jim -

Never heard of St. Macaire, either. There is (was?) a Cotes de Bordeaux-St Macaire appellation for sweet white wines.

Anyway, I looked it up under the Vitis International Variety Catalogue (http://www.vivc.de/), which lists it under "Saint Macaire" as a black grape with the synonyms Bouton Blanc (even though it is not a white grape); Macau, Moustere, and Moustouzere. The database doesn't give any other info.

I know of one other winery using St Macaire in Australia, besides Westend Estate. Hollick of Coonawarra have some, or so they told me a couple of years ago when I visited. I'm not sure what they do with it.

The Westend Calabria St Macaire is a very good wine, but I don't know whether the variety has a place in the already crowded field of "new" varieties in Australia.