Malbec’s Journey From Cahors to California,Malbec is proving an interesting – albeit unpredictable – addition to the state’s vineyards.
In the same year that Bill Clinton became president of the United States, malbec finally appeared as a grape variety in its own right in Napa County.
Until 1993, it was included in the “other blacks” category in the area’s Agricultural Crop Report, along with more obscure varieties such as early burgundy, grand noir, carmine and saint-macaire.
Since then, the French – and now Argentine – grape variety has been making slow but steady progress in America’s most famous wine region. It won’t be replacing cabernet sauvignon any time soon, but the fifth and last red Bordeaux variety to arrive in the region is in more bottles of Napa red than you might think.
Of course, malbec wasn’t really a grape anyone had heard of outside of wine circles in the early 1990s. It entered into popular consciousness only when the Argentines came along with their varietally labeled malbecs in the new millennium and made a big splash in North American wine aisles. Argentina’s global wine exports were equivalent to just 9.6 million bottles when the country’s government abandoned the peso’s fixed one-to-one peg with the American dollar and floated the currency, leading to a huge depreciation. Since then, wine exports have boomed, reaching 105.5 million bottles in 2011, with malbec representing around two in every five bottles shipped. Not bad at all for a Bordeaux blender.
Indeed, “Argentina has been the warm-up act for the consumer” when it comes to malbec, says Jon Ruel, president of Napa Grapegrowers and chief operating officer of Trefethen Family Vineyards in Napa’s Oak Knoll District.
The South Americans have made drinkers comfortable with the variety and paved the way for other malbec producers to succeed. For example, although winemakers in the Cahors region of south-west France have been growing malbec for more than 800 years, it was the Argentines who made the grape their signature variety, with great success.
