Ask most wine drinkers where Malbec comes from and they'll say Argentina. It's a fair guess. Argentina grows more Malbec than the rest of the world combined, and Mendoza put the grape on every wine list on earth. But Malbec is French, and it's old. Its story starts in Cahors, a small city on the Lot river in the South of France, where people have been making dark, powerful wine from this grape for roughly a thousand years.
The black wine of Cahors
In the Middle Ages, the wine of Cahors was so deeply colored that merchants called it the black wine. It traveled down the Lot and the Garonne to Bordeaux, and from there to England, where it developed a reputation far beyond its region. Legend has it the black wine was served at the wedding of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the future King Henry II of England in 1152, and the church of Cahors used it as communion wine for centuries.
The grape itself went by local names, Côt and Auxerrois among them. The name Malbec came later, and stuck. For most of its history, the wine's problem wasn't quality but geography: Bordeaux sat downstream and controlled the port, taxing and delaying the wines of the interior so its own could ship first. Cahors made great wine and Bordeaux made great margins.
Disaster, twice
In the late 19th century, phylloxera, a vine-killing insect from America, destroyed most of Europe's vineyards, and Cahors was hit brutally. The region's vineyards, once among the largest in France, shrank to a fraction of their size. Then in February 1956, a catastrophic frost killed much of the Malbec that remained in the Southwest and in Bordeaux, where growers largely replanted with Merlot instead. In its own homeland, the grape nearly vanished.
The Argentine detour
Malbec survived because it had already left. In 1853, a French agronomist named Michel Aimé Pouget brought Malbec cuttings to Argentina. In the high, dry sunshine of Mendoza, the grape found conditions it loved: intense light, cool nights, and none of the damp that troubled it in France. Over the next century, and especially from the 1990s onward, Argentine Malbec became a global phenomenon, plush, fruit-forward, and impossible to ignore.
The irony is gentle: the world fell in love with Malbec five thousand miles from the place that invented it.
Cahors, again
Back home, the growers of Cahors rebuilt slowly. In 1971 the region earned its AOC, France's official designation of origin, with rules that require its red wines to be at least 70% Malbec. Cahors Malbec kept its old character: darker, firmer, and more structured than the Argentine style, with the savory depth that made the black wine famous in the first place.
Why we start there
Our family's vineyard as it was first being built: tractors breaking ground for the rows where our Malbec grows today.
When we set out to make a non-alcoholic wine worth drinking, the grape chose the place. Rewine is single-origin Malbec from Cahors, grown and made by a 5th-generation winemaker whose family has worked this land through most of the story above. The photographs on this page are our own, taken when the family vineyard was first planted. We remove the alcohol gently and leave everything else, which is our way of adding one small chapter to a very long book: a thousand years in, the black wine of Cahors now comes with zero proof.
Taste the history in our Malbec Red, or read how the alcohol comes out without taking the Malbec with it.
Santé.