After spending considerable time in Australia, I’ve returned home more convinced than ever about what might be called the primacy of place. Put another way, you can’t blend your way to greatness.

What about Bordeaux, you ask? Isn’t that a blended wine? It certainly is, typically a mix of cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and cabernet franc, along with dollops of petit verdot and malbec. Châteauneuf du Pape in the southern Rhone Valley is even more extreme, with 13 grape varieties authorized for the district’s great red wine.

Blending grapes from one vineyard, however, is different from blending among far-flung vineyards or, in the large-scale Australian model, among even more distant regions. That it works for low-end commodity wines is indisputable, as Australia has demonstrated to the world with resounding commercial success. To borrow from Carly Simon, nobody does it better.

The problem is that once wineries, and especially winemakers, get into a mentality of blending they begin to believe in their own supremacy. Winemakers, you see, love to blend. Not only does it give them something to do, but more important, it makes them primary. You’ve “created” the wine: You’re seminal.

A single-vineyard wine requires a greater deference — more humility and less ego — to a higher power, the vineyard site. This is especially true for single-vineyard wines composed of a single grape variety such red or white Burgundy (pinot noir or chardonnay), Barolo or Barbaresco (nebbiolo) or rieslings from Alsace or Germany. You don’t hear wine producers from any of those places crowing about their importance. They always talk about their vineyards.

HERE’S THE DEAL Zuani “Vigne” Collio Bianco 2005 — This extraordinary dry white wine from the Collio district in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy (on the border with Slovenia) is an example of a mentality of blending allied to a recognition of the primacy of place.

Zuani “Vigne” is a dry white wine composed of four grape varieties, the proportions of which vary from vintage to vintage: friulano (previously known as tocai friulano), chardonnay, pinot grigio, and sauvignon blanc, but all of these grapes come from a single 12-acre vineyard. The “Vigne” designation signifies the bottling that sees no oak at all.

Another white wine, simply named Zuani, spends time in small oak barrels. Zuani is a new label from Patrizia Felluga and her son, Antonio, whose family is famous in the Collio district as the owners of the Marco Felluga and Russiz Superiore wineries (the odd-sounding name is that of the località, or hamlet, where the vineyard is located). Given the family’s extensive vineyard holdings (nearly 500 acres) and winemaking experience, it’s no surprise that Zuani has proved to be exceptional from the start.

The 2005 Zuani “Vigne” is an exceptionally dense, rich wine with pristine, beautifully delineated flavors of lemon rind, melons, and a definite edge of minerality. $23.

Saint-Émilion 2005, Château La Croix de Jaugue — Although wine snoots nowadays consider merlot a synonym for boredom — nowhere more resoundingly proclaimed than in the pinot noir-centric movie “Sideways” — the fact is that a good merlot is a real pleasure.

The trick lies in the phrase “good merlot.” Regrettably for wine lovers, too many merlots are banal, trading more on mere smoothness and less on real flavor interest, never mind character.

Bordeaux’s Saint-Émilion district, along with Pomerol, has long been the world’s repository of really good merlot. You won’t find any merlot mudslinging in these precincts. Each district’s greatest wines, such as Château Cheval Blanc and Château Ausone in Saint-Émilion and Château Pétrus and Château Lafleur, are composed of substantial amounts of merlot, typically making up at least one-third and often half or more of the blend (the balance is usually cabernet franc).

Château La Croix de Jaugue is about three-quarters merlot and one-quarter cabernet franc. In the great 2005 vintage, this property turned in a lovely performance. It issued a soft, lush, ripe (but not overripe) red wine that slides down the gullet with a deceptive “where-did-the-winego?” silkiness.

Is this a red Bordeaux meant for the ages? Not at all. But at a price of $15 a bottle at Gotham Wines & Liquors, among others, it’s a genuinely delicious, substantive merlot from Saint-Émilion as well as a top vintage. What’s not to like?