An all-but-vanished grape of the Charentes that turns out to sit at the root of Bordeaux. When DNA typing in 2009 sought the second parent of both Merlot and Malbec, it found the same obscure black variety — Magdeleine Noire des Charentes — of which barely a handful of vines then survived, one in Brittany and a few as ornamental plants beside farmhouse doors. Crossed with Cabernet Franc it gave Merlot; crossed with Prunelard it gave Malbec, which makes those two right-bank pillars half-siblings through a mother almost no one had heard of.
Never a wine grape of any account, it owes its rediscovery entirely to the children it left behind. Conserved now in ampelographic collections, it is the quiet proof of how much of the modern vineyard descends from varieties that history very nearly lost.