From the vineyard

Possibly France’s oldest, certainly its most distinctive, but probably one of its lesser-known wines, Cahors takes its name from the capital city of the Lot département in the south-west. It is the only French red wine made mainly from the Malbec grape, known locally as Auxerrois or Côt, producing deep, dark, inky liquid known as “black wine”, due to the grape’s high concentration of anthocyanins, the pigment-bearing compounds in grape skins.

Cahors has produced Malbec-based wines since the Roman era; one is still marketed under the name Prince Probus, after the third-century emperor. They acquired huge prestige and popularity in medieval England after the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry II in 1152. Known then as one of the strongest of all red wines, they were particularly favoured by Pope John XXII, himself a son of Cahors, born in 1244 and famous for clashing with the early Franciscans, who defended their poverty by claiming that Christ and his apostles owned nothing, a view which John XXII declared heretical. Cahors was the wine preferred by the Orthodox Church for the liturgy and Tsar Peter the Great set great store by it as a cure for his ulcers. Until the nineteenth century the wines of Cahors were as popular as those of Bordeaux and were even used by the canny Bordelais to bolster lighter clarets, adding body, colour and structure. They cheekily put tariffs on Cahors leaving France via Bordeaux’s rivers.

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