Pete made dinner for Dave and I this Monday night. He prepared a chickpea ragout recipe from Jacque Pepin’s book Fast Food My Way. He added sweet Italian sausage to the recipe which included sauteed onion, scallions, garlic and tomatoes from our garden. I also made garlic bread to accompany the ragout. By the way, it made great leftovers for lunch today! Along with dinner we drank a 2007 Clos Siguier Cahors. This is the first Cahors the three of us have ever had. Wines from Cahors use the Malbec grape and were one of the original Bordeaux varietals.
This wine was a very dark ruby color. There was dark, rich fruit and spice in the nose. Pete got some black currents in the nose. The flavors tasted of dark fruit with a rich spiciness. There was a moderate amount of well integrated tannins along with a very light body. The wine paired well with the ragout, but as this wine remained in the glass the flavors became much lighter to me. Pete and Dave did not notice this change in the flavors. Overall, this wine was not pleasing to me although Pete found it somewhat interesting. The flavors were too light along with a light mouth feel, too watery for my taste. This is one of the wines we purchased last month when we went in to K&L Wines in San Francisco. We wanted to try a Cahors, as we had never tasted one prior to tonight. We were expecting a wine with big rough tannins, which this wine did not have. We will continue our search for other Cahors to see if we can get a better idea of what this varietal really is like.
I’m glad you are enjoying our stories. I hope you will continue to follow us. It will be interesting what Clos Siquier has to say about that vintage. As I mentioned, this is my first experience with Cahors, although I have had several Malbecs from Argentina and the USA. I will see if I can find some of your wine here and try it, too. What vintage do you suggest we start with? We do not have a FaceBook account yet but I am planning to create one soon.
Pete
This is great reading your post and your interest in trying new wines. So congrats for trying our old-world Malbec! Your last comment is also the right attitude: you can’t make an opinion over any wine region if you don’t sample enough wines from it. This applies to Cahors but same to Oregon, California, Chile, etc. I hope you’ll find great Cahors in your quest and if you can’t…your last option is to spend your next holidays in Cahors! BTW: Clos Siguier is not a very far winemaker neighbor , I’ll ask him how he’d describe his 2007 vintage.
Do you have any FaceBook or Skype account we can follow so to read your wine stories?
Cheers,
Philippe