Fioretti, 2021

Malbec, but not the inky kind: bright, floral and mouth-watering, from old vines on a hillside above the Lot.

Louis and Charlotte Pérot left publishing and bookselling in Paris for a hilltop farm above Puy-l'Évêque, where sheep, goats and hens share the land with the vines and a horse does the ploughing. Fioretti is Côt — the local name for Malbec — from small plots planted in the late 1970s on iron-rich clay over limestone at Duravel. Nothing is added, not even sulphur, and the wines age in an old limestone quarry. Far from the dark Cahors of reputation: bright, lifted, delicately floral, with lip-smacking acidity.