United States of Wine

Cotton Blossom Winery – Argentina Malbec – N/V

Price: $14.95; Cache Road Discount Liquor, Marlow, OK

As a born and raised Texan, I have little hope of ever liking anything from Oklahoma. But my drinking partner was heading to Lawton for a work trip—in what I can only image was a cruel prank from his supervisor—so I asked him to bring me back a bottle of Sooner State wine.

Cotton Blossom Winery is in Marlow, Oklahoma, a town of nearly 4,400 and just inside the border of Chickasaw Nation. So I was curious why the word “Argentina” was on their bottle of malbec wine. At this point, I assume they must’ve shipped malbec grape juice in to produce and bottle the wine themselves.

The wine poured a deep dark color, with purple splashes hitting the side of my glass. But when examined in the light, I could see a hue of a dull rusty red.

The scent of this wine is something I had a hard time identifying, as it was a odd sweet smell. The wine smelled like sweet barbecue sauce, sliced white bread and saliva, essentially the least-best parts of a brisket sandwich.

The first sips tasted exactly like cran-grape juice, a sweet/tangy combination that I usually like, but not in my wine glass. And it was nowhere near what a malbec should taste like, especially those from Argentina.

Letting the wine get some air took away the cranberry-like tang, but the wine was still sweet like juice, with no depth to be found.

So the question remained: How did Oklahoma screw up a malbec that came from the malbec capital of the world?

After some research, it turns out that Cotton Blossom Winery is known for their sweet fruit wines, especially those made of plums. It appears that plums grow well in Oklahoma, including native varieties. Who knew?

Did Cotton Blossom mix the Argentina malbec juice with their regular plum wine juice? And if so, at what percentage? Well, these are questions I couldn’t find answers to because Cotton Blossom doesn’t have an extensive digital footprint and answers were hard to come by.

So the rest of the tasting was done under the assumption that there was malbec and plum juice mixed into this wine. Let me tell you, know that made a huge difference. In that next sip, it was immediately evident that there were plums in this wine. The taste I could not previously describe correctly (sorry barbecue sauce!) was in fact a juicy, mouthful of dark plum, with a hint of malbec.

The malbec was keeping this wine from being too sweet, and thus making it drinkable. But I was disappointed that the plum information wasn’t on the bottle. When I was expecting a malbec, this wine was terrible. But knowing I was drinking a plum wine with some malbec infused in it made an interesting pairing that played on my tastebuds.

This wine is definitely just OK. I wouldn’t go out of my way to try to find it again, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, especially as a malbec. But it’s not the worst fruit-infused wine we’ve had, and it definitely was better than I thought it would be. It’s nice to see Oklahoma might actually have something going for it.

Score: 4.5/10