An old black grape of Gaillac that came within a whisker of extinction and was pulled back. Prunelard — the name recalls the sloe, prunelle, for its dark, wild-fruited character — is a parent of Malbec (with Magdeleine Noire), which alone would earn it a place in the record. By the late twentieth century it had all but disappeared, until the Plageoles family of Gaillac rebuilt it from a few surviving vines.
It is now a rare success story of revival: replanted across a growing handful of hectares and admitted to the Gaillac appellation, it yields deep, peppery, structured reds. Where Magdeleine Noire survives only as an ancestor, Prunelard has been given a second working life.