Cahors emerges from backwater with fine wines

Prayssac, France

BACK in 1975, Jean-Marie Sigaud had a brilliant idea. As a child, Mr Sigaud, whose family grows grapes and makes wine in the Cahors region in south-western France, had heard the old men talk about how the best wines, the ones that had won medals at international expositions, historically came from the steep limestone slopes of the hillsides.

Those slopes throughout Cahors were now abandoned, covered in trees, with the occasional stone terrace wall the only reminder of the presence of vineyards before the phylloxera aphid devastated the grapevines of Europe in the late 19th century.

"It's not worth the expense," Mr Sigaud recalled being told. "It's too steep and dangerous to work with tractors." But he went ahead and planted anyway. He planted more in 2005. Now, as the patriarch of Métairie Grande du Théron, work…