Tasting Room: Up in malbec country

This week's tasting mission is to find some malbec, and we've heard about a winery in Camino that's especially obsessed with this varietal.

So it's time to hit Highway 50 east and head up the hill.

Less than an hour from downtown Sacramento, we're pulling off a rainy Carson Road and into a fourplex called Camino Wine Tasting. Garnet Sun Winery is among the tasting rooms here; the others are Auriga Wine Cellars, Illuminare Estate Winery and Findleton Estate & Winery.

But malbec is at the heart of Garnet Sun Winery, so we wipe away a couple of raindrops and step inside. True to its name, you'll see a sun hanging on a side wall and French oak barrels stacked in the background. Irish music plays on a stereo (it was just before St. Patrick's Day), and now it's time to taste.

Michael Beem is working the tasting room this day, and he's also the winemaker behind Garnet Sun. Beem started his winemaking career crafting pinot noir in "Sideways" country (a.k.a. Santa Barbara County) but settled seven years ago in El Dorado County. Part of the enduring attraction is a terroir that he finds suited for malbec.

"There's all this decomposed granite in the soil, and during the summer, the ground gets so hot that it almost turns to cement," says Beem. "The more the vines struggle, the better the wines end up. You've also got the altitude."

Malbec is one of the classic Bordeaux varietals, along with cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc and petite verdot. But malbec has found an especially fruitful home in Argentina; it thrives in high-altitude vineyards and is the country's signature wine grape. Malbec wines, especially those from Argentina, are known for their full taste of dark fruits, their tannic grip and their affordability.

Beem's Garnet Sun Winery is still a small operation producing about 1,000 cases annually, with about 110 of those dedicated to malbec. His 12 acres of vineyards are about 20 minutes away, on the other side of Highway 50 in Fair Play.

Today's tasting is one that'll just about turn your teeth purple. Save for an orange muscat dessert wine, Garnet Sun Winery has only red wines for sale at the moment.

The tasting starts with the pinot noir-ish 2006 mourvedre ($24), which drinks with a lot of tart cherry taste; while the 2007 cabernet franc ($28) is stuffed with huge tannins and has a deep purple color.

But the star of this lineup is the 2006 malbec ($26). The wine has a pleasing and somewhat floral nose, and the taste is full of plum and black cherries. This malbec tastes riper than its Argentine counterpart, but the reasonable alcohol (13.8 percent) and pronounced acidity suggest this malbec would pair especially well with food.

And if you're still craving more malbec, Garnet Sun Winery bottles a 2007 port ($26) that begs for a square of chocolate.

"I just love the dark fruits, the blackberry, the richness," Beem says of his fondness for malbec.

"In Napa, people go crazy for cabernet, but we've got a good thing up here with malbec."