Cabernet Franc, fine French black grape variety, much blended with and overshadowed by its progeny the more widely planted cabernet sauvignon. Only in Anjou-Saumur and Touraine in the Loire Valley, on the right bank of the Gironde in Bordeaux, and in parts of north east Italy is it quantitatively more important than Cabernet Sauvignon, but Cabernet Franc is sufficiently widely grown to be one of the world’s 20 most planted cultivars for wine.
In the vineyard it can be distinguished from Cabernet Sauvignon by its less dramatically indented leaves but the two share so many characteristics that they had for long been thought to be related. In 1997, thanks to dna profiling, it was established that Cabernet Franc was, with the Bordeaux white vine variety sauvignon blanc, a parent of the noble Cabernet Sauvignon (see cabernet sauvignon for more details).
There is some evidence that the variety’s origins lie in Spanish Basque country but by the end of the 18th century, Cabernet Franc was already documented as producing high-quality wine in the Libournais vineyards of St-Émilion, Pomerol, and Fronsac, where it is often called Bouchet today. Long before this, however, according to Odart, it had already been selected by Cardinal Richelieu, as a well-respected vine of south west France, to be planted at the Abbaye de St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil in the Loire by an abbot called Breton, whose name persists as the Loire synonym for Cabernet Franc to this day.
Cabernet Franc is particularly well suited to cool, inland climates such as the middle Loire and the Libournais. It buds and matures more than a week earlier than Cabernet Sauvignon, which makes it more susceptible to coulure, but it is easier to ripen fully and is much less susceptible to poor weather during harvest. In the Médoc and Graves districts of Bordeaux, where Cabernet Franc constitutes about 10% of a typical vineyard and is always blended with other varieties, it is regarded as a form of insurance against the weather’s predations on Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes. Most Libournais bet on Cabernet Franc in preference to the later, and therefore more difficult to ripen, Cabernet Sauvignon to provide a framework for Merlot, Bordeaux’s most planted variety.
In Bordeaux, plantings of Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon were almost equal, at about 10,000 ha/25,000 acres, in the late 1960s but Cabernet Sauvignon was so often chosen in preference to Cabernet Franc by those replacing unprofitable white wine vineyards that by 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon covered more than twice Cabernet Franc’s total area in the Gironde of 11,155 ha/27,553 acres.
As a wine, Cabernet Franc tends to be rather lighter in colour and tannins, and therefore earlier maturing, than Cabernet Sauvignon although cheval blanc, the world’s grandest Cabernet Franc-dominated wine, proves that majestic durability is also possible. Cabernet Franc is, typically, light to medium bodied with more immediate fruit than Cabernet Sauvignon and marked fragrance, including sometimes some of the herbaceous aromas evident in unripe Cabernet Sauvignon.
Cabernet Franc is still planted all over south west France, although, in appellations such as Bergerac and Madiran (where Cabernet Franc is known as Bouchy), Cabernet Sauvignon has been gaining ground.
Cabernet Franc has been France’s sixth most planted black grape variety throughout the twentieth century with about 40% of its 2011 total of 35,214 ha in the south west and just over a quarter in the greater Loire Valley. Steadily increasing appreciation (largely within France) of relatively light, early-maturing reds such as Saumur-Champigny, Bourgueil, Chinon, and Anjou-Villages fuelled demand for Cabernet Franc in the Loire at the expense of Rosé d’Anjou and Chenin Blanc whites. Here Cabernet Franc tends to be the dominant variety in perfumed, fresh red wines that can smell of raspberries and/or pencil shavings.
Cabernet Franc is also well established in Italy, particularly in the north east (see friuli and veneto in particular), where it has sometimes been encouraged to yield such quantity that wines can be over-herbaceous and where some vines previously thought to be Cabernet Franc have been identified as Carmenère. Some Tuscan and central Italian producers of Cabernet Sauvignon grow the variety for blending purposes but in bolgheri and the rest of the Maremma it can yield wines of real interest and complexity, as it does at Tenuta di Trinoro in southern Tuscany. The 2010 Italian vineyard survey found a total of 6,313 ha of Cabernet Franc in Italy, less than half of the Cabernet Sauvignon total. Elsewhere in Europe, only hungary takes Cabernet Franc particularly seriously—particularly in Villány.
Elsewhere, with a few notable exceptions such as Viader, Cabernet Franc has generally been grown for the express purpose of blending with Cabernet Sauvignon, following the Bordeaux recipe whether or not the climate suggests that such insurance would be wise. California’s total plantings of the variety, 3,428 acres/1,388 ha in 2012 concentrated in Napa and Sonoma, have remained stable for years. The variety has been responsible for some well-balanced, fruity wines in washington State where the winter-hardy Cabernet Franc is more resistant to winter freeze than Merlot, but it has been losing ground to the more fashionable Syrah and there were only 972 acres/303 ha by 2011.
In the cooler northern and eastern wine regions of North America (especially virginia, the Niagara Peninsula of canada, where icewine has been made from it, Pennsylvania, and Long Island in new york State), Cabernet Franc has emerged as the red vinifera variety of choice, ripening much more reliably than Cabernet Sauvignon and providing much more extract than do most hybrids.
argentina has barely 400 ha of Cabernet Franc, while Chile has 1,450 ha, some of the best being old vines in Maule.
In Australia Cabernet Franc plays a very minor, generally lacklustre part while most of the best of New Zealand’s 166 ha/410 acres play a part in Hawke’s Bay blends. Although the likes of Rijk’s and Warwick make fine varietal versions, Cabernet Franc is planted on less than one per cent of South Africa’s vineyards.
As the pendulum swings back from super-concentrated, high-alcohol reds, Cabernet Franc may well benefit.
Bowers, J. E., and Meredith, C. P., ‘The parentage of a classic wine grape, Cabernet Sauvignon’, Nature Genetics, 16/1 (1997), 84–7.
Enjalbert, H., Les Grands Vins de Saint-Émilion, Pomerol et Fronsac (Paris, 1983).
Galet, P., Dictionnaire encyclopédique des cépages (Paris, 2000).
