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It’s fun tasting wines from grapes grown in their birthplace. For international varietals like Cabernet Sauvignon or Syrah, this usually leads to France. So does one other fascinating immigrant story – Malbec.
Even though we credit Argentina for the popularity and worldwide fame of Malbec, which took to its adopted homeland like bees to honey, the grape’s birthplace is a small vineyard area in Southwestern France named Cahors. Dubbed “the black wine of France” for its color and history, locally Malbec is known as “Cot” or “Auxerrois”. (The French don’t like to simplify things when it comes to wine.) There are some pure Malbecs made in Cahors, although usually, as is the French way, the wines are blends of Malbec, Tannat and Merlot to add softness and flavor to this rustic terroir.
Strong, tannic, and earthy, Cahors Malbecs are a great value to any carnivore (such as yours truly). I recommend a wine I tried a few weeks ago: Chateau du Chambert 2000, which cost $18 at Brookline Liquor Mart. I actually had their 1994 vintage a few years ago, which was then a random curiosity pick to see what a French Malbec tastes like. I was into serious wine note writing then. Reading back, it turns out I liked the wine for the same reasons—its unusual coarse texture, leathery feel on the mouth, and very subtle red fruit reminiscent of blackberries—very unlike the fruitier, juicier Malbecs from Argentina.
Here is a bit of history that is the essence of French winemaking and what they mean by terroir—when the flavor of the grape is a representation of culture, history, and winemaking more than its biological properties.
Cahors was developed by the Romans before Bordeaux. It enjoyed tremendous popularity in the late-teen centuries for its ability to produce the strong, inky black wines for the masses. The Romans liked their wines strong and dark. Then the famous plague of wine, phylloxera, wiped out almost all of the vineyards in Cahors in the mid-1880s, after doing the same damage to Bordeaux a decade earlier. France was going through a recession at the time, and this agricultural corner of the country slipped into obscurity and never developed as much as the port city of Bordeaux—although a few stubborn winemakers who believed in the land replanted and stayed on. The area was finally awarded the AOC (Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée) status in 1971.
It is somewhat of a rarity to find more than a few of Cahors wines in Boston stores. They fly under the radar of wine connoisseurs, don’t occupy a lot of shelf space, and don’t adorn the front pages of wine journals. Hence they are usually not expensive. But they provide a good return on investment.
That is, after all, Malbec’s native land. It’s like drinking history (minus the images of Romans throwing parties).
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