pop & pour

By Raymond Lamontagne

[These bottles were provided as samples for review purposes.]

Happy Malbec World Day! Hopefully you read Peter’s review of the first seven bottles of this 14-bottle bacchanal, so that you are up to speed on this day’s origins. I’m certainly ready to do my part. I unabashedly enjoy Argentinian Malbec, even if in some examples I can struggle with its ubiquity, its oft-simplistic bent toward pure hedonism, and (said another way) its purple Popsicle crowd-pleasing “Golden Retriever of wine” stylings. Crack a frown once in a while, will ya? Still, Argentina is rife with high altitude wine regions where true greatness is possible. I would propose that much potential remains to be realized, particularly as some middle path between confectionary and brooding smoke is hewn. Today, though, we can and should celebrate what a decidedly unique wine culture has already delivered. I don’t think the vintners in Argentina who decided to take a chance on these extremely inclement sites ever dreamed that international superstardom was possible. Or that Malbec would be the vehicle to get them there.

Malbec likely originated in Cahors, where it goes by the name “Cot”. Apparently the “black wines” from this region, an obvious reference to Malbec’s intense colour, were sometimes used to add pigmentation and body to the wines of Bordeaux, at least until Cot itself made the jump to that famous region in the late 1800s. The handle “Malbeck” apparently refers to a vintner who wound up cultivating the grape throughout the Medoc region of Bordeaux. A half-sibling of Merlot, Malbec (which at some juncture lost the “k”) is a vigorous vine that can easily yields large crops of relatively watery berries, particularly when clones are selected for such productively, a feature that according to Stephen Brook led to Malbec’s drastic decline as a Bordeaux variety. Fear not, however. Malbec was introduced to Argentina by French agricultural engineer Michel Pouget in 1868, where is yielded smaller, tighter clusters of berries than in Bordeaux. Pouget seemed to have chosen better clones, or at the very least Argentina’s extreme viticultural climate was just what was needed to resurrect Malbec into the dark-fruited, violet-scented, slightly gamey wines we can enjoy today. As I write this, it is 8:00 am here in Calgary. What can I say? I’m thirsty, and it’s Malbec World Day.