Gaillac withstands the climate: can these old grape varieties save the wine?
In the Tarn valley, Gaillac is etymologically the Gallic rooster, but also the pride of an Occitan vineyard founded in Gallo-Roman times, resisting the invaders with its native grape varieties, which have become the best defense against climatic stress and the globalization of tastes.
The 5,000-hectare appellation, AOC since 1938 for whites and 1970 for reds, has never completely succumbed to the international grape varieties deployed after the war on its generous slopes, which are more clay than limestone. Sauvignon, muscadelle, merlot, cabernet, syrah and gamay have always had to make do in this hedge- and grove-ridden landscape, along with the local grape varieties, mauzac, far from the eye, or braucol.
Do the old have a future?
Since the 1970s, over three generations, the Plageoles family has helped to rehabilitate a handful of other grape varieties that had all but disappeared: duras, prunelart and ondenc. These varieties, saved by Marcel, documented by Robert (author of three books) and widely planted by Bernard since 1983, have gradually regained ground before regaining, along with the first three, their status as main grape varieties. The appellation's specifications, reformed in 2017 and 2025, require them to account for 70% of blends, relegating the international varieties to secondary status - with exceptions in a range of seven wines: dry white, sweet, late harvest, sparkling, rosé, red and primeur.
Of Gaillac's six grape varieties, two are shared - mauzac with Limoux and braucol or fer servadou with Marcillac in Aveyron - and four are unique in France: le loin de l'œil, a local child for five hundred years; l'ondenc, given away lost throughout the XXᵉ century, taking refuge here after having disappeared from Bordeaux and Cognac.s having disappeared from Bordeaux and Cognac; duras, related to savagnin, and prunelart, ancestor of malbec and cousin of Fronton's négrette. But the struggle for identity that forged Gaillac is now coming up against climate change. Do these old grape varieties have a future? They have withstood " globalization ", but will they be resistant to the scourges of the XXIᵉ century, drought, heatwaves and cryptogamic diseases?
