Let's be Franc

My favourite wine grape variety is one of the most elegant and more feminine of the classic French red varieties - Cabernet Franc.

Cabernet Franc is an integral component of many great red blends in Bordeaux, California, Italy and even here, in God’s Own! In the finest blended examples from these wine regions, if Cabernet Sauvignon is Yang, Cabernet Franc is Yin.  It provides the finesse that so often balances out the brash, robust and overly confident qualities of its very own child - Cabernet Sauvignon.

Yes, you read that correctly. Somewhere in South-West France in the 1600’s, Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc got jiggy with it and produced the testosterone charged variety known as Cabernet Sauvignon.

Over my 28-year career in wine, I’ve been fortunate to taste many different expressions of Cabernet Franc. While many of the best Bordeaux blends have more than a dash of Cabernet Franc in the blend and are considered to be some of the most complex and prized wines in the world, in my opinion at least, single varietal, single vineyard, fresh, nuanced Cabernet Franc’s are much more interesting than these blended, tannic, oaky prima donnas.

The most important Cabernet Franc wine producing region in the world, specializing in single variety Cabernet Franc, is the Loire Valley. This region of France is cooler than Bordeaux, so the wines typically have more herbal and nuanced red-fruit primary (sadly there are still too many in the region pursuing a more machismo, oaky, Bordeaux style). For me, the best Loire Cabernet Franc styles are fresher, lower in alcohol, less oaky and typically have higher acidity than their Bordelais equivalents.

In my opinion, when Cabernet Franc is harvested at moderate potential alcohol levels and made in a balanced, respectful way, it is often texturally more aligned with ripe Pinot Noir styles, as opposed to Cabernet Sauvignon, the variety it is so often linked to.

Perhaps this is why, in Paris, Cabernet Franc from the Loire is considered to be the perfect bistro red, often served slightly chilled in the summer months.

So, if you are not a fan of big tannic reds, but like me, are getting a little bored with Pinot Noir, then more elegant styles of Cabernet Franc could be just what the doctor ordered. And for what it’s worth, the very best of these styles of Cabernet Franc age so much better than Pinot Noir!

17 years ago, I did a ‘blind’ tasting of two Cabernet Franc based wines for a gaggle of Masters of Wine. The only information the tasters had, was that one wine was an older vintage, single varietal Cabernet Franc from the Loire Valley and the other was from a more recent vintage, from a famed producer in Saint Émilion (Bordeaux) that had close to 50% Cabernet Franc in the blend.  Before the wines were revealed, all in the room (including myself) indicated the fresher wine was the Saint Émilion and the wine that smelt like a horse’s rear end was in fact from the Loire Valley. How wrong we all were!

It turned out that the wine we all loved so much was a relatively unknown Loire producer from the 1947 vintage. The desperately disappointing wine was from the amazing 1989 vintage and was one of the most famous estates in Bordeaux. At the time of tasting, the Bordeaux was close to 20 times the price of the Loire producer’s current release!

A lesson in humility, true value and the importance of a balanced winemaking ideology in making wines that continue to improve for many, many years in bottle.