Bordeaux's most famous child is a chance seedling: DNA typing in 1996 revealed Cabernet Sauvignon as the offspring of Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc, born in some seventeenth-century field. First recorded as "Petite Vidure" in the Médoc around 1755, it spread with the golden age of the estates because it loved exactly what they had to offer — deep, warm, well-drained gravel.
Small, thick-skinned and late, it gives the structure the Médoc is built on: dense tannin, cassis and cedar, and a capacity for age no other Bordeaux grape matches. It is the world's most planted quality variety, yet nowhere more itself than between Margaux and Saint-Estèphe.