Tuesday, 20 May 2014

La Patrie Cahors 2012


An absolute shocker of a wine. Advertised as '£11 reduced to £6' it remains terrible value at either price point. Thin, sharp and totally lacking in any fruit of any kind. Odorless. Couldn't finish my glass. It went into a coq au vin.

This highlights Sainsburys folly in trying to flog the malbec grape to supermarket consumers by 'dressing it up' with the prestige of the Cahors region. The end result is to defile both. You wonder who on earth actually produces this stuff? Sadly, it's a very long time since I had an interesting Cahors at a sensible price (La Grillade). Granted you don't see it often in the UK (entry point is typically at least £10) but you would think they would want to to cash in on the explosion of interest around Argentine malbecs? The worry here is that this may be a microcosm of a wider problem within the French wine industry: dogged refusal to accept that the cachet of their terroir/regional branding is nowhere near as powerful a draw as they would like it to be. Globalisation means that consumers are increasingly unlikely to care less where the product comes from or what 'heritage' they are buying into.

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