Foreign Letter, Local Sound
TASTING NOTES: ““The wine is rich with a dusty tannic character. It has black-currant flavors that are packed with both fruitiness and balanced acidity. The organic grapes give a pure line of ripe fruits that are going to integrate well with the tannins.” – Wine Enthusiast K-or is the most obviously mineral wine in winemaker Emmanuel Rybinski’s lineup. Grapes are harvested early for appellation standards and fermented/aged in unlined concrete squares (Emmanuel makes the point that he prefers to have living biology present on the walls of his vessels). Emmanuel paints the K on the label here red because he cherishes the “bloody” aromas this wine gives off upon opening.” (AbV 13.5%)
VARIETALS: 100% Malbec
BARRELS: Not specified.
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: K.
Some letters carry their whole native language and some just visit. K is the second kind in French — it barely exists there natively. Look through actual old French vocabulary and you’ll find almost no K’s that aren’t loanwords: kilomètre and kilogramme came in with the metric system in the 1790s, kayak and karaté got imported wholesale from Inuit and Japanese with their spelling intact, kaki (the fruit, and the color) drifted in from Japanese too. The Académie Française, an institution that has picked fights over “email” versus “courriel,” basically shrugged and let K stay a foreigner in its own alphabet.
So a wine called “K-or” is doing something quietly funny before you even open the bottle — it’s smuggling the least French letter there is into the front of a French wine name, and using it to spell out the sound of the appellation itself. Cahors, minus the parts that don’t matter to your ear, is just “k-or.” It’s the kind of naming decision that only works if you say it out loud, which I did, alone, in my kitchen, more than once.
ICYMI, you have two choices:
- Worried Summer heat might get to your wine before your wine gets to you? Order from the sale linked here, and we’ll get it to you at a cooler time of year!
- Want it shipped now? Every package during the summer will have protected temp control ground shipping for much of the country that takes longer but will ensure safe delivery. Expect up to two weeks for delivery. Now through the September 12th offer.
