Wine · Medium strength

Malbec

Plush, plummy, and unmistakably Argentine — the steakhouse's house red.

How to order it: Mendoza at altitude. Dark fruit, violet, soft tannin. Born for grilled meat.

The story

Malbec is French by birth — the famed 'black wine' of Cahors, shipped down the river Lot since the Middle Ages and dark enough to unsettle Bordeaux merchants. Its second act began in 1853, when French agronomist Michel Aimé Pouget brought cuttings to Argentina at the new agricultural school in Mendoza. While a catastrophic 1956 frost gutted the grape's standing in France, it was quietly thriving at altitude in the Andean foothills, where intense sunlight and cool nights turned a rustic European also-ran into something plush, violet-perfumed, and unmistakably Argentine. By the 2000s it was the country's flag in a glass and the steakhouse world's reflexive pour. Cahors, to its credit, never stopped making the original.

Adjacent pours