This is the medieval "black wine" of the Lot — so dark and so durable that England taxed it in its own right, even as the Bordeaux middlemen throttled its passage downriver with the privileges of the police des vins. Malbec is at home here: the grape is côt, and its history on these limestone causses and river terraces is far older than its Argentine fame.
The appellation nearly died twice — phylloxera razed the vineyard in the late nineteenth century, and the great frost of 1956 finished much of what had been rebuilt. Its revival owed something to an unlikely mirror: as Mendoza carried Malbec to world celebrity, the glory reflected back on the mother appellation, and Cahors reclaimed the grape's homeland as its own argument.