By Mike Dunne — Bee Food Editor
Published 2:15 am PDT Wednesday, June 15, 2005

This is an excerpt from the Sacramento Bee.

Paul and Maggie Bush are giving up their fight to retain the name Mélange de Trois for one of the wines they make at their Madroña Vineyards and Winery at Camino in El Dorado County.

The French phrase translates as "blend of three." The Bushes began to use it a few vintages ago for a white wine made with three grape varieties closely identified with France's Rhone Valley.

Their Mélange de Trois mixes marsanne, roussanne and viognier grapes into a richly fragrant and flavorful white wine that sells for $16 and steadily wins gold and silver medals on the competition circuit.

Now, however, they fret that their standing as a small, respected, family-oriented foothill winery might be tarnished through guilt by awkward association.

Sleaze is creeping into wine marketing, with sexual associations from the brash to the coy showing up on more labels, and the Bushes want no part of it. Nearly a decade ago, Folie à Deux Winery in the Napa Valley started to use the phrase "Ménage à Trois" for a series of wines also made with three grape varieties.

"Ménage à Trois" means "household of three," though it's come to represent a sexual liaison involving three people, a contemporary use Folie à Deux happily exploits with its marketing. "Ménage à Trois brings together three strange bedfellows: moscato, chardonnay and chenin blanc," notes the winery's Web site.

After Folie à Deux was bought by Napa Valley neighbor Trinchero Family Estates a year ago, Trinchero officials asked the Bushes to stop using Mélange de Trois. When the Bushes balked, Trinchero sought an injunction against Madroña.

Though the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California denied Trinchero's request two months ago, the Bushes have changed their mind about whether Mélange de Trois is such a good name.

The turning point came at a recent open house at the winery. When the Bushes heard guests making sexually explicit jokes at the expense of the wine, they figured Madroña's image was at risk.

"I really like the term," Paul Bush said. "It describes what the wine is, but we started to get this negative feeling, that we were part of this trendy sexual imagery, and we didn't want to go there.

"We've had the wine two or three years, but we hadn't experienced that association before."

In addition, the Bushes found the litigation distracting and exhausting. "They had three lawyers working on it, and they asked us for everything under the sun in terms of documents, research, etc.," said Maggie Bush in a statement issued after last week's agreement between the two wineries to drop federal and state cases stemming from the disagreement.

The Bushes will continue to make the wine and will simply call it Melange.

That will be just fine by the folks at Trinchero, said Mary Ann Vangrin, the winery's publicist.

"The sticking point was the similar-ity between the phrases. The names were too similar. It was confusing," Vangrin said.