Ian others, comments on Cahors

I'd also be interested in this. My understanding is that Cahors is generally a Malbec area. Having enjoyed many Argentinian Malbecs, I wondered how Cahors' own compared. I'd imagine it'd be less fruity in style, in common to how other varietals compare to their French implementations.

Dan

Salut/Hi Josh

le/on Thu, 23 Sep 2004 18:07:34 -0500, tu disais/you said:-

Yup, I saw your comments. I've been to a couple of the "big" players' sales rooms, and found all their wines distinctly underwhelming. I'd not go so far as to say that I found a medinical taste, but your medicinal may be my "rough as guts".

Cahors is an appellation in search of a viable identity. In the (not so) good old days, it made three styles of wine, of which one was distinctive and famous "black" wine. This was a wine made by methods that would almost certainly be illegal nowadays and which was blended to give body, colour and tannin to the (then) pallid stuff from Bordeaux. Another was a light almost pink wine, similar to the Clairet of the day from Bordeaux and a third was an ordinary red.

Post WW2 vicissitudes almost caused the appellation to die out, and when it re-started, vignerons didn't really know whether they were trying to make a wine with great keeping powers - of which the Malbec is perfectly capable, or a country wine for quick drinking. Part of this has to do with the land upon which the vines were growing. As always, the better wine (potentially) was made from vines that were stressed by being grown on poor hillsides, and the cheaper wine is produced in lusher flatter fields.

So, just like Bordeaux, or California, or anywhere really, there's a wide variety of styles, qualities and prices available. In supermarkets in France one finds generic "Cahors" at very low prices. Some of them are marginally drinkable. There is a coterie of producers who sought to create a sort of "brotherhood" of winemakers who could sell their wines at higher prices, through making them a bit better than the average, but with heavy duty marketing. Blind tasting of these wines revealed the lack of interest, and I'm afraid that the venture failed to take off, though the group still exists.

Parallel to all this, there are quite a number of wineries making excellent wines. That said, they are STILL in some difficulty as to what identity to give them. Should they be making a wine for relatively rapid consumption in which case the (traditional) Malbec is not an ideal grape, (so they blend with other varieties, diluting the true Cahors character) or should they go all out to make a "real" Cahors, using >75% Malbec, and producing a wine which demands at least 10 years' aging - in a world where fewer and fewer people are prepared even to age Classed Growth Bordeaux that long. The prices of really good Cahors are relatively reasonable (some €10 to €12 for all but the very most expensive) and people find it hard to believe that a wine at that price will improve for 10 years.

You should also be aware that such jaunts as you took part in are funded largely by biggish consortia, and so you should no more expect to find great wine produced on such a jaunt, than you would if a similar visit to California were largely sponsored by Gallo.

Ian Hoare wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Definitely a rough experience and why they thought we would appreciate the

Actually the other two stops we made were smaller operations both a which made nice wines (the St Emilion making grand cru most years) had I room and strength I would have popped a case or two in the carry on.