Friday, June 24, 2005

Cahors

I’ve been reading a book by Michael Sanders, “Families of the Vine.” Sanders spent part of 2003 (the year of the heat wave) with three vineyards around Cahors, a pretty, old-fashioned town southeast of Bordeaux. Sanders wanted to put wine in an “ordinary, unthreatening, everyday context,” so he chose Cahors, an ancient but not famous wine made from an uncommon grape, the malbec, which he describes as “like the local people who grow it . . . small, thick-skinned, and sometimes hard to cultivate.” I enjoyed the people he talks about in the first half of the book but my interest waned as the author waxed increasingly philosophical about terroir and the threat of global capitalism. A chapter near the end, however, about the sommelier in Cahors’ best restaurant, was worth the price of the book. To deal with my failing attention, I decided to replace passive learning with active learning, bought three different bottles of Cahors for twelve to nineteen dollars each and invited my daughter over for a grilled leg of lamb. (She is a big fan of the malbec in its more familiar appearance as the major wine of Argentina.) Here is our impression of the wines:
(1) Clos la Coutale, 2001. The wine was a youthful purple, with a shy bouquet (of blueberries, like all the wines), creamy texture, and pleasant to drink.
(2) Château du Cèdre, 2001. The wine was an entrancing deep purple, about the color of Batman’s cape at night. The bouquet was sweet fruit, smelling of mint after thirty minutes. We both found this wine, with its velvet texture, the most “delicious” in our before-dinner sampling.
(3) Clos de Gamot, 1996. When I first decanted this wine, it smelled fusty and seemed a little thin in the mouth. An hour later, it was singing a different tune, a complex assembly of fruit, herbs, flowers, game, and an earthy mushroom note. The wine seemed to lift the lamb to a higher plane as well.
The Gamot is made by the Jaffreau family, who have been making it in the traditional way for centuries. The other wines are more modern and “international” in style – which typically makes them drinkable earlier and more popular or “hedonistic.” In many ways, our impressions seemed to confirm Sanders’ paean to traditional wine-making. As he writes, complaining fashionably of the “insidious” global influence of Robert Parker: “Though Parker may have only a tangential influence on the world of Cahors wine, he is important nevertheless as a harbinger of that ever-encroaching trend called globalization, a trend whose merest ripples can be ascertained on the fringes of that bastion of traditional winemaking, the family-owned, family-run vineyard. Cahors, so far only lightly touched, represents to me almost a ‘before’ snapshot . . . ” Here’s the funny thing: Parker rates the traditional, family-made Gamot highly, describing it as “the finest example of Cahors I have ever tasted.” The so-called Parkerized Coutale is rated lower, captured by the adjective “attractive.” The Gamot is a more complex wine than we were expecting and Robert Parker himself is also a good deal more complex than Sanders seems to have taken the trouble to discover.

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