Château du Cedre, Cahors 2019

This is limited edition Library Stock from one of the best wineries in the South of France.

There is a very short supply of this wonderful wine, in delicious, drinking condition.

It also comes from a stellar, sunny, ripe vintage. This is good news!

When people started taking notice of Cahors in the early 2000s, it was largely because of this winery and the wonderful work of Pascal Verhaeghe. This is the estate wine that essentially reclaimed Malbec as a French grape variety and opens the gates to sensational red wine, made about 200km south east of Bordeaux.

This wine is made from Malbec vines that were planted in the early 1990s; fermented in large vats and aged for 18 months in two types of oak barrel, one that is 57,000 litres (for real!) and several 500-litre barrels, both adding something different to the overall blend.

The 2019 delivers dark and juicy fruit, with integrated savoury spice flavours that lead to nuances of cinnamon and nutmeg. Now showing with integrated tannins and generous concentration, there is a sense that this is the plateau at which that the wine should be consumed - it is really very fine.

Grown on soils of 500,000 year old limestone scree, the family get the most from their natural approach to vineyard management, preserving the finest quality of fruit, using no additives in the winemaking process apart from a tiny dose of S02 at bottling. The wine is actually a blend of 90% Malbec with 5% each of Tannat and Merlot.

Malbec comes from Cahors, where it has given dark, concentrated and structured wines for centuries, all the while looking on at the successes of its neighbour, Bordeaux. Cahors producers used to bring their wines to the nearest port (Bordeaux) in order to get their wines exported to drinking markets (England...) only to be told that the export market (England...) wouldn't like the style of their wines.

So they used to either give them peanuts for the wine and say "we'll see what we can manage..." of course trying to push their own stuff to the English. But, to add insult to injury, what often happened was that the Bordeaux producers of the day would see that the Cahors producers had wonderfully rich and dark wines (made from Malbec) that possessed many of the characteristics that their own wines were missing, and actually blend the Cahors into their own wines to beef them up, then selling them to the Brits as their own wines!

No wonder the region remained so unknown for so long... These days however, it's all sweetness and light and Cahors is a happily growing wine region with massive interest in it because of the gigantic success of Malbec on the global stage.