2016 Chateau Quattre Malbec Cahors 750 ml

The 2016 Château Quattre Cahors was exactly what we needed: Full-bodied, loaded with intense black fruit, earth, and floral notes on the palate, the wine simultaneously displays firm tannins and a velvet texture. Structured and intense, it combines the complexity and nuance of fine Bordeaux with the attitude and verve of southern French reds.

After a day on the wine trail in Bordeaux, this stunning red jolted our tired palates awake, and instead of unwinding in Bordeaux’s city center as we’d planned, we pulled out our laptops and got to work. Every search and phone call made us more determined to share this inky red with the lucky Wine Access members waiting back home. Earning 95 points and a Platinum in the Decanter World Wine Awards for its “intense, vivid drench of pure fruits, touch of licorice, fine tannins, and good length,” Château Quattre’s Malbec is a must-have value bottle for any lover of bold, rich red wines.

We were so determined, in fact, that we drove to Château Quattre, reserved as much as we could, and called the Wine Access brass to get them started on the import paperwork—we couldn’t let our members miss out on this French standout at the best price in the nation. $20 per bottle.

Grown in Cahors, the ancestral home of the Malbec variety that originally produced some of the most famously rich, dense wines in all of France, this 2016 was exactly as exciting on U.S. shores as it was in Bordeaux. In recent years, Cahors has become a national epicenter of innovation in viticulture and oenology, and Château Quattre is among the producers generating the most buzz throughout France for it. 

Year in and year out, Château Quattre produces critical favorites from its small estate perched at the top of the Cahors appellation, where thin topsoil over clay and limestone forces ancient Malbec vines to struggle, producing dense, concentrated reds that marry power with classic French finesse. 

At just $20 each, we don’t expect our share to last for long. Our bottle—and then a second one—certainly didn’t that night in the Bordeaux wine bar. Which is pretty much the highest praise we can offer.