Crocus l'Atelier, Cahors, Paul Hobbs

This is a gorgeous, authentic, structured and earthy, yet modern, sophisticated, oaky and smooth Malbec made in its home of the south of France! Full of vibrancy and flavours of dark fruit laced with vanilla and culinary spices, this has a lifted texture that is reminiscent of balanced Clarets and the best of Mendoza. Blessed with a long finish that is dry and layered, it has enough charm of sweet oak that makes you want to come back for more and more!

This wine is made by world-renowned winemaker Paul Hobbs, from the Napa Valley, and local winemaker Bertrand Gabriel Vigouroux, whose family have farmed in Cahors for four generations. 

Together, they have established a winery that has more than fulfilled their goal of creating Malbecs that redefine the grape from the roots of its birthplace. Seeking to balance his New World savvy and the massive potential from the terroirs and natural quality in Malbec, the winery was established in 2011 to further add to Hobbs' reputation as a specialist in this grape.

What is perhaps most uplifting is not that they have turned the appellation on its head or found a wonderful modernist interpretation in a New World style - actually far from it. The result in the bottle is very much of the same breath as the best wines in the region that we already know: it goes to prove, therefore, that the search for excellent wine in this wonderful region will actually bring you to a similar place, whichever way you choose to go about it.

Of course you can get nuances and differing use of barrels and so on, but the integrity to the grape and its flavours is retained here (as in the other best wines in the appellation) and the oak influence while being closer to the 'new' is never in the way of accessing the expression of what is a much over-looked and delicious.  

Malbec comes from Cahors, the rural region to the south of Bordeaux, where it has given dark, concentrated and structured wines for centuries, all the while looking on at the successes of its northerly neighbour. Cahors producers used to bring their wines to the nearest port (Bordeaux) in order to get their wines exported 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 as their own wines to the market!

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.