A Bordeaux red lost at home and quietly alive abroad. Saint-Macaire was once grown across the Gironde's Entre-deux-Mers country; by the twenty- first century France counted well under a hectare of it. What saved it was emigration — carried to California in the nineteenth century, it survives there among the old "field blend" varieties and on the historic list of grapes permitted in a Meritage red, with scattered plantings as far as Australia.
It is the classic shape of a forgotten grape: not extinct, but exiled, holding on far from the vineyard that named it. Its wines are deeply coloured and firm — a rustic memory of what Bordeaux's blend used to contain.