One day, in the early 90's while at work, I got invited to a departing lunch for a technology consultant that worked in our group. The majority of the people wanted to go to a Spanish restaurant near the office building that I worked in. So we split up into groups of 4 and decided on drivers to the Spanish restaurant. While heading to the restaurant our group discussed the food that we thought of getting.

Since I was not familiar with Spanish food, I decided to play it safe and order chicken and rice and perhaps some french fries. When it came time to order a beverage, I elected for a soda since we were at a work lunch. The rest of the group and majority of the people ordered several bottles of wine to split among all groups at our big table. Taking a glance around the table after the bottles were delivered, I saw a common theme - Most of the bottles were a Merlot made in Chili and it was called Sunrise.

Following lunch that day I stopped at a wine store while driving home to investigate the wine that seemed so popular during lunch. I found the wine after a bit of browsing and observered that it was not a real expensive bottle. I purchased one and brought it home for dinner that evening.

As we sat at the dinner table we opened the wine and had a taste. While we have never been big wine drinkers, in the past, we enjoyed this Merlot (Sunrise from Concha y Toro). We began purchasing this type of wine, on a weekly basis, and it soon became our social drink of choice.

Soon it became a weekly event to purchase 1 bottle of Sunrise for dinner and we continued this tradition for a number of years until we decided to try and make our own Merlot. We did not want to walk on grapes or anything like that but we did want to try to make wine. We did our research and found a wine kit that seemed simple enough to produce a batch of wine yet inexpensive enough to pursue.

When the kit arrived we quickly created our first batch of wine but we had to wait for 30 days until it fermented.

While we enjoyed making our first batch of wine and gave most of the bottles to our friends, we wanted to have more involvement than the wine kit allowed. So we went back and researched again until we found a more manual process to make wine. We decided to try the new process and purchased it accordingly.

We purchased a big bucket, large spoons and other key ingredients including Merlot grape juice from Chili. When all the equipment arrived, wine making now seemed really complicated but we gave it a try anyway and waited 45 days until the wine fremented.

We enjoyed the second batch of wine making because we felt like it was a real product of hard work while the first batch seemed as though it was too effortless. Unlike the first batch of wine when we took the standard labels that came with the kit, this time we elected to create our own label. One of the big decisions to make when designing a label for a wine bottle was the name.

We pondered on different names and concluded that the name should be short and simple yet something reflective of our efforts. We knew that we had 45 days until for the name of the wine but wanted to get it done so we can get the labels printed and ready for the bottles.

Finally we chose a portion of our last name followed by the type of wine we have enjoyed for so many years (Merlot) to to create - Marm-lot.

Although we only produced one batch of wine called Marm-lot (which had an amazing taste) we hope to produce another batch soon - perhaps in time for our next host of the Supper Club.  Who knows, maybe we will even try to make an American Black and Tan :)