Malbecs marvelous for many, but make me miserable

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(SUBMITTED)

The song "I Don’t Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats has been running through my head for exactly two weeks now.

And it’s my husband’s fault.

We were at a Brandon Wine Society tasting, and the featured wines — we tasted six — were all Malbecs.

Regular readers of this column may recall me saying dozens of times in this space that Malbec is not exactly my favourite grape. The only Malbec I’ve found I even remotely cared for, at least until two weeks ago, was Argentina’s Finca Los Primos, introduced to me by a close friend who prefers to go by the moniker "Mr. Malbec," as he loves that particular varietal.

I was astonished that, not only did I NOT hate said wine, but actually quite enjoyed it, and was all the more enamoured, when I discovered it was only $10.95 a bottle.

That said, it’s not exactly a go-to wine for me. There are hundreds of others I prefer — vastly prefer — to the Finca Los Primos. And those are the ones I tend to drink on a regular basis.

But when the Wine Society tasting notice arrived at the beginning of the season, and when I saw that the February tasting was going to focus exclusively on Malbecs, I decided to fling caution to the wind, and embrace the opportunity this session would provide. Hopefully, I’d find out, once and for all, if I just hadn’t yet found the right Malbec for me, or if it was indeed true that I, generally speaking, wasn’t a fan.

So I signed us up for the event, and hoped for the best.

We joined the other members of the BWS on February 16th and set to work. (Perhaps the word choice of that last sentence is a dead giveaway — these evenings are always fun, but I was obviously approaching this particular tasting with a negative attitude.) I knew that Malbec had originated in France, but that it had made its way to Argentina, and the latter country had laid claim to Malbec and pretty much made it its own. On the tasting table were six bottles wrapped in numbered brown paper bags. We were informed that one of the six was from France, three were from Argentina, one was from Australia, and another was from the U.S.

Since we taste the wines blind (which discourages preconceived biases, whatever they might be), the characteristics of each wine are always outlined for us in a handout, to shed some light on what we should look for colour-wise, aroma-wise and taste-wise.

Cindy Rousseau, product consultant with the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission, highlighted the characteristics of the six wines for the assembled masses, and emphasized that the Malbec from France, which turned out to be Chateau Hauts D’Aglan from Cahors, would have very much an Old World aroma.

Did it ever. I took one sniff of Wine Number One (it probably would have been more appropriate to have labelled it Wine ‘Number Two’), and almost coughed. While Rousseau and her product consultant counterpart Kevin Kotyk loved what was elegantly termed the "rustic" fragrance of the French Malbec, I had another descriptor for it.

"This smells like an outhouse," I muttered to my hubby and my friend Cathy, who was sitting next to me.

They both laughed, and we proceeded to sample the wine. It was supposed to have "nuances of black fruit, olive and black pepper." I could taste the olive and pepper, all right. It just smelled like the olives and pepper had passed through someone and had festered in said outhouse for some time before being bottled for our drinking ‘pleasure.’

(The previous paragraph is in no way intended to slag the Chateau Hauts D’Aglan. I always maintain that I won’t write about wines I don’t like — there’s no point in maligning a product that some folks may love — case in point: Rousseau and Kotyk. And I’m betting lots of Malbec fans, especially those who love classic Old World beverages, would find something appealing about this wine, which, incidentally, sells for $15.30. But as you’ve probably gathered by now, it just wasn’t for me.)

We sampled the other five, and I found one I didn’t mind, and made a second choice, as we are requested to do. My first choice — and happily for me, it was the favourite of the vast, vast majority of the folks at the tasting — was the Trivento Golden Reserve Lujan de Cuyo from Argentina ($19.95). Its mix of chocolate, raisin and licorice was, in my estimation, the most palatable potion of the lot. And for Malbec aficionados — ones who like the jammier, fruitier versions of the wine produced in Argentina — I’m betting this one would be a hit.

My second choice was the Luigi Bosca Malbec Reserve, also from Argentina, which sells for $15.95. Blackberry, vanilla, sour cherry, and plum came together to make an interesting beverage, at least to my taste.

The other wines — the Don Rodolfo Malbec from Argentina ($15.45), Bleasdale’s Second Innings Malbec from Australia ($15.69) and the Coppola Diamond Collection Malbec from the U.S. ($24.35) — had their supporters, but I wasn’t one of them. While all the wines tasted slightly different, and a WHOLE lot better with cheese, I still wasn’t a convert.

Then, as I hemmed and hawed and tried to make up my mind which wine was which (I only identified the French one correctly, by the way), my husband nudged me and drew my attention to what he’d written at the top of his tasting notes.

In block letters, just so there was no doubt, he’d boldly written, "I DON’T LIKE MALBEC."

Immediately, the musician in me substituted "Mondays" for "Malbec" and I began humming the Boomtown Rats biggest — and only — hit, albeit with a new lyric — one that, despite a concerted effort on my part to change, sums up the way I feel.

Like my husband, I don’t like Malbecs. And I can’t tell you why. All I know is, they’re just not for me.

Republished from the Brandon Sun print edition March 2, 2013