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| The wines of France’s southwest are seemingly always on the verge of being rediscovered. And it is a region that richly deserves rediscovery. The sud ouest holds an embarrassment of viticultural riches, with a wide array of historical winemaking styles and a slew of interesting, archaic grape varieties. And yet always a contender and never a champion. Not once, despite my best efforts, has a single soul walked into my shop to ask for a bottle of Gaillac, Marcillac, or even Cahors, the latter especially surprising to me as it is the homeland for the popular malbec grape variety, a grape which many drinkers assume is somehow native to the country that put it on the map, Argentina. That said, if a wine drinker knows the name of one appellation of the sud ouest, Cahors will be it, often followed by the phrase, intoned with great solemnity, “the black wines of Cahors.” From reading this phrase, you might assume that the malbec grape makes darkly pigmented, tannic wines, but the anthocyanins in it are no higher than many other red varieties—the black wines, historically, were vin cuit, “cooked” wine made from slowly simmering grape must to concentrate flavors and color before fermentation. I do not know if anyone makes vin cuit in Cahors today, but the reputation of malbec as a big, dark, tannic wine persists. Tonight, we are indeed tasting a wine from Cahors, made from malbec, and it is something of a curiosity as it is lightly pigmented, and light-bodied. I always assumed that malbec was a thick-skinned, tannic variety, but the folks who grow this wine, Nicolas Fernandez and Maya Sallée, explained to me that it is actually a thin-skinned variety with a lot of tannins, and that they have learned, as a handful of others in the region have, to handle malbec gently so as not to extract unwanted tannin. If you handle malbec like other red grapes, e.g., frequent punch downs during fermentation, you end up damaging the skins and extracting a lot of tannins, and that has been the practice in the region as well as Argentina. The remedy is to lavish new oak barrels on the resulting wine, as oak attenuates the organoleptic qualities of tannin, and mellows wine out. Rough handling and the compensatory practice of using new oak to make a less-astringent wine, is why you often see so many oaky, and to me, taste-alike malbec. It is really quite a revelation to taste malbec unmolested in this way, as it reveals a new perspective on the grape and an object lesson on how to teach a sleepy old dog new tricks.
Causse Marines “Dencon” Vin de France NV |