MALBEC

Well-made Argentine Malbec—and more examples are made each harvest—is about as delicious a red wine as there can be: wonderful ripe black plum fruit, touched with tastes of raisin and licorice; plentiful but gentle tannins; and an unctuous, nearly viscous feel in the mouth.

It blends well with the Cabernet brothers (Franc and Sauvignon), complecting their tannins and adding both color and other flavors (especially anise and plum).

Robert Pepi, chief winemaker for Bodegas y Viñedos Valentin Bianchi n Mendoza, Argentina, says, “I think that Malbec can do for Argentina what Shiraz did for Australia.”

Beginnings
Malbec didn’t start out with such high praise. Long before it became cutting edge in Argentina, it was up somewhere on the blade in France—where it has more names than a christening book.

In Bordeaux, it is called Côt or Pressac; in Alsace and Cahors, Auxerrois. (Argentina names it Fer, while Portugal refers to it as Tinta Amarela.)

It is the base (at least 70%, by law) for the aptly named “black wine” of Cahors, a well-known wine town in southwestern France. In a good year—which, for Malbec, means a warm, dry season—it gives Cahors extraordinarily deep color and the tell-tale taste of black plums, aromatic of tobacco leaf.

But in a year with less heat and more moisture—a usual year, that is—Malbec may come off tannic and “green.”

The Loire Valley grows Malbec, around Tours, where it is called Côt. There, the flavors tend toward black-red fruits such as black raspberries and Bing cherries. But because the requisite “warm, dry season” is infrequently experienced in the Loire, Côt isn’t planted widely along the Loire.

Perhaps its most well-known French apparition has been in Bordeaux where it has long functioned to add color and softness to many a blend. However, after the severe frost of 1956, growers hesitated to replant it to the same measure it had earlier enjoyed.

Another grape, Merlot, is less susceptible to Malbec’s weaknesses—namely rot and coulure, a physiological disease of the vine in which buds fail to ripen into grapes. Likewise, Merlot does a better job at tenderizing Cabernet Sauvignon’s austerity.

So, post 1956, Bordeaux saw a lot more Merlot planted—and a lot less Malbec.

Argentina
Long preceding the Bordeaux frost, around 1850, Malbec emigrated from there and planted itself in Argentina. (No cuttings came from Cahors.) These plants were pre-phylloxera and, to this day, Argentine Malbec is raised on its own roots on nearly 25,000 acres of vineyard land.

In the high, dry, sunny climate of the Andes, Argentina’s Malbec vines produce berries that are smaller than French Malbec (with greater skin-to-pulp ratios, therefore darker color) and with riper, plusher tannins.

“Malbec loves the sun,” says Pedro Marchevsky, vineyard manager at Bodega Catena Zapata near Mendoza. “It is the same sun in Bordeaux or Cahors, but in Mendoza, it is a pure sun. So, it has long days and lots of radiation.”

"In Mendoza, we have an average of 150 days between bud break and picking time,” adds Jose Alberto Zuccardi, managing director of Familia Zuccardi and Viña Santa Julia, an enormous producer of Malbec. “That means a very long ripening period. Even though you can taste all the necessary sugars in the Malbec 30 days before harvest, the rest of the grape is not mature. So those 30 days of “hang time” ripen the polyphenols and tannins to their optimum.”

Eats
What’s for dinner with Malbec? Well, at the top of the list is what every Argentinean would choose first—the national meat, beef.

The average Argentinean downs around 150 pounds of beef each year. (By contrast, the average North American, around 70 pounds). The male Argentine, on many a day, will enjoy two meals centered on beef.

It is delicious beef: lean, because the cattle graze on grasses, not grain. Tender, because the animals meander over the Pampas, the enormous, flat heart of Argentina west of Buenos Aires.

Cooking beef in the Argentine way might mean grilling it, or roasting tenderloins of it in the oven, with nary a grain of salt or fleck of pepper.

And because Argentina was settled by so many immigrant Italians, many pasta preparations work well with Malbec. Try dishes such as pasta puttanesca (a sauce of tomatoes, black olives and peppers), with a thick slice of grilled Provolone cheese set aside it, topped wit a splash of green olive oil. Muy gusto.