For a thousand years, locals have tamed the cliffs by terracing them with stone walls from top to bottom. Their crop: wine, so fine the poet Dante sang its praises and medieval kings and popes ...

Cabernet Sauvignon, native to Bordeaux, has thick blue skins, giving the resulting wines plentiful tannins and phenolics and making them particularly ageworthy. Over the past 50 years, Cabernet ...