The crisis
A grape with two thousand years of history
Malbec did not begin in Argentina. It was a French grape, with roots that, by some accounts, go back to Roman times — once known by other names, planted across southwestern France, and so admired that Eleanor of Aquitaine reportedly served it at her court in the 12th century. In Bordeaux of the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, Malbec was the dominant grape of the Médoc — more important than Cabernet Sauvignon. An 1879 Encyclopaedia Britannica still listed it as Bordeaux's leading variety.
Then everything went wrong for it in France. The phylloxera plague of the late 19th century devastated European vineyards. When growers replanted, they overlooked Malbec — it was low-yielding and, in Europe's “Little Ice Age” climate, vulnerable to frost and the flowering disorder millerandage. The killing blow came in the brutal frost of 1956, which wiped out much of what was left. The grape that had built Bordeaux's reputation was now a footnote in its own country.
Crossing the Atlantic
It would have been the end of the story, except for two things: an Argentine president and a French agronomist.
In the mid-19th century, Argentina's reformist leaders Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Juan Bautista Alberdi believed the country's future depended on welcoming European immigrants and modernizing its agriculture. As part of that vision, in 1853 Sarmiento brought a French agronomist named Michel Aimé Pouget to Mendoza, who imported the first French vine cuttings to Argentina — including Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. Today, April 17th is celebrated worldwide as Malbec Day to mark exactly that moment.
In Mendoza's dry, sunny, high-altitude foothills of the Andes, Malbec did something it had never quite managed in cool, damp France: it ripened fully and reliably. The vine had quietly found its true home, even if almost no one outside Argentina knew.
