October 2026
The Month of
Home Ground
Ask the people who make Cahors where Malbec was born and you get an unusually honest answer. The appellation’s own paper on the grape’s genetics poses the question and closes it in four words: “Nul ne le sait.” Nobody knows. What Cahors can prove is longer and better than a birthplace: written sources naming the grape as the region’s principal one in the 1580s, a law that still says so and puts a floor under how much of it a grower must plant, and a departure in 1853 that ended in Mendoza by way of Chile. That is the shape of this month. Each of October’s wines sits on, or is named for, the ground its story is supposed to begin on — a Cahors Malbec from the oldest terrace of the Lot, a Langhe Nebbiolo from a Barolo family farming organically at Vergne since 1971, a single-vineyard Chianti Classico from the estate where the recipe was written — and in each case the documents complicate the story in a way that makes it better.
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01
WEEKDAY · UNDER $20
GEORGES VIGOUROUX CHÂTEAU LERET-MONPEZAT RÉSERVE MALBEC DE CAHORS
2022 · Cahors, Southwest France
Blackberry and damson, a swipe of cocoa, and the iron edge that separates Cahors from the plusher Malbec Argentina made famous. The grape has a longer paper trail here than anywhere else: Cahors’ written sources name it, under the alias auxerrois, as the region’s principal grape around the 1580s, and the appellation’s rulebook still requires Cot, as the law spells it, to make up at least 70 percent of a grower’s Cahors plantings. Leret-Monpezat sits on the fourth and oldest terrace of the Lot valley, above the river’s long meander from Albas to Belaye, on what the Vigouroux house describes as “limestone scree cones mixed with ancient alluvium over 500,000 years old.” The estate belongs to Count Jean-Baptiste de Monpezat and his family; Bertrand-Gabriel Vigouroux, whose own family has grown Malbec in the region since 1887, consults on the vines and the cellar. The tannin is real but the fruit is generous, and it wants food more than it wants ceremony. At $19.97, it is Malbec with its papers in order.
TASTING NOTES
Blackberry, damson, cocoa, iron
PAIRS WITH
Duck confit, mushroom and lentil stew
GRAPE
Malbec, alias Cot (AOC principal grape)
DRINK WINDOW
2026–2030
Vintage Context
2022 in Cahors read like a disaster until it didn’t. Vitisphere ran the blows in order: frost in early April across the western part of the appellation, a late-June hailstorm over 1,300 hectares, another in September, and in between a drought the piece sums up in one line: “Pas une goutte de pluie.” Not a drop. In early August the alarm was coming from the appellation’s own president. Nicolas Fournié, who heads the AOC Cahors wine syndicate, put the June hail at 50 percent damage on average across the appellation, and said the hailed vines were that much less ready for the water stress that followed. Then the harvest came in and the same man changed his tune: real material, a very good vintage, alcohol that stayed moderate against every expectation, and old vines that had absorbed the shocks. His last line is the one that matters for this bottle: “Le malbec a bien résisté à la sécheresse.” Malbec held up well to the drought. Yields fell to 40 to 45 hectoliters per hectare against a normal 50, which is how a bad year turns into a concentrated one.
Build the Board
via Murray’s Cheese
A weeknight board from the Southwest end of the counter
Cantal · Saucisson sec · Agen prune jam · Picholine olives · Sliced baguette
02
SATURDAY POUR · $20–$50
G.D. VAJRA LANGHE NEBBIOLO
2025 · Vergne, Piedmont, Italy
Lively garnet, and the perfume that makes Nebbiolo worth the trouble: wild strawberry and red cherry, dried rose, a dust of spice, then tannin that arrives fine and stays. The family is Vaira; the winery carries the initials of Aldo Vaira’s father, Giuseppe Domenico, and spells the name Vajra with a j. Aldo started farming the family’s land at Vergne as a teenager in the late 1960s and made his first vintage in the early 1970s; in 1971, “then still a university student,” he was among the earliest in Piemonte to farm organically. This is the wine the house makes to explain the grape without the wait. Giuseppe Vaira’s line on the fact sheet is the whole brief: “This wine is our quest for the innocence of Nebbiolo, its purest expression.” The fruit comes from young vineyards across the Tortonian and Serravallian valleys, named for the two Miocene ages that laid their soils down, on calcareous slopes between 280 and 550 meters. No oak anywhere: fermentation lasted up to 20 to 25 days, the malolactic happened on its own, and the wine spent roughly four months in steel before bottling in March. It takes a light chill and an hour open, and it makes a Saturday feel considered. At $23.97, it is the friendliest thing a serious Barolo house puts its name to.
TASTING NOTES
Wild strawberry, red cherry, dried rose, spice
PAIRS WITH
Tajarin with sage butter, roast pork loin
GRAPE
Nebbiolo (100%)
DRINK WINDOW
2026–2031
Vintage Context
The Vairas call 2025 a vintage of “very low yields, yet extraordinary fruit quality,” and their account of it reads like a field diary: a moderately cold January, then a spring “announced by primroses, almond and apricot blossoms and an early Nebbiolo budbreak.” The rain that spring demanded careful protection in the vineyard and paid it back as water reserves for a very warm June, a sequence Vietti describes in almost the same terms from Castiglione Falletto. What the wider region did not share was Vajra’s hail: “Several hail events naturally reduced the crop,” the estate says, while Vert de Vin’s account of the same season from the Deditus group of Barolo producers names no hail at all and reports damage as limited. Hail is a parcel-scale event, and this hail was Vajra’s. Nebbiolo for this bottling came in between September 12 and October 2, “in a late and extended harvest,” under bright days and wide swings between day and night. The estate’s summary is the one to remember: “A small vintage in terms of quantity, yet one of radiant fruit and rare beauty.”
Build the Board
via Murray’s Cheese
A Saturday board from the Piedmont end of the cheese counter
Toma Piemontese · Bresaola · Cherry mostarda · Marinated artichokes · Grissini
03
SPLURGE · $50+
BARONE RICASOLI CENIPRIMO CHIANTI CLASSICO GRAN SELEZIONE
2021 · Gaiole in Chianti, Tuscany, Italy
Sour cherry and dried orange peel, tobacco leaf, a bass line of warm earth, and Sangiovese’s acidity running through all of it like a wire. CeniPrimo is one vineyard: 6.35 hectares planted in 1998 on an old river terrace above the Arbia, at the southern edge of the Brolio property, on what the estate describes as “silty deposits, little evidence of stone, with the presence of clay, a little limestone and poor in organic matter.” Poor ground, in other words, and the wine has the concentration to show for it. The formula it descends from bears this estate’s name. In 1872 Baron Bettino Ricasoli, twice Prime Minister of the newly united Italy, put down the first recipe for Chianti, and the Consorzio still quotes it: the wine “receives from Sangiovese its main dose of aroma (for which I particularly aim) and a certain vigorous sensation.” A century and a half on, the estate’s top wine is 100 percent Sangiovese, aged 22 months in 500-liter tonneaux, and bottled at a declared 15 percent alcohol against a total acidity of 5.95 grams per liter. Decant it, give it lamb, and give it time. At $87.99, this is the argument for Sangiovese made by the family that first wrote it down.
TASTING NOTES
Sour cherry, orange peel, tobacco leaf, warm earth
PAIRS WITH
Bistecca alla Fiorentina, wild boar ragu over pappardelle
GRAPE
Sangiovese (100%)
DRINK WINDOW
2027–2038
Vintage Context
Two documents describe the 2021 season on this hill, and they disagree. The Consorzio Vino Chianti Classico, speaking for the whole appellation, calls the weather “quite regular”: spring rain that built up water reserves, a dry summer the vines got through without drought stress, and a Sangiovese harvest “starting around 20th September and ending after a month.” Ricasoli, speaking for this one terrace of silt at 300 meters, calls the same year “quite unusual,” and names “the frost of last April, the drought suffered in the summer months and the early ripening of the grapes.” Both are telling the truth at their own scale. An appellation-wide average cannot see a single vineyard’s frost pocket or a silt terrace that holds no water, and a single vineyard cannot speak for the region. The date shows how local the story is: CeniPrimo was hand-picked on October 4, 2021, two weeks after the regional Sangiovese harvest opened, then given about 14 to 16 days on the skins and 22 months in tonneaux, 30 percent of them new. That is what a Gran Selezione is for — the claim the average cannot make.
Build the Board
via Murray’s Cheese
A splurge board from the Tuscan end of the counter
Aged Pecorino Toscano · Salame Toscano · Chestnut honey · Oil-cured black olives · Rosemary crackers
Subscribers get a weekly pick that never hits the site — a fourth bottle, every Thursday, in The TERROIR Letter.
Producer Spotlight
Massican
Napa, California — the winery named for a hill its founder’s family left
Dan Petroski makes only white wine, in Napa, from Italian grapes, under a name that belongs to a ridge north of Naples his mother’s family came from. The flagship is named for the mother herself, and its label says California rather than Napa Valley because the fruit is farmed well beyond Napa. October’s featured bottle, the Massican Annia White 2025 at $30.97, is a wine about home ground that keeps refusing to sit on just one.
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