Fer Servadou

Identity

Fer Servadou is a grape with four names, and each belongs to a valley. Braucol at Gaillac, Mansois at Marcillac, Pinenc in Béarn and at Madiran, Fer N in the official catalogue. It is the mark of a variety that stayed local long enough for every district to give it one of its own.

Pl@ntGrape describes it in a sentence worth quoting whole, because it holds both the grape and its difficulty: "Fer gives lively wines, moderately coloured but fairly tannic and rustic, with strongly marked (wild) aromas."

Rustic, wild. These are not compliments, and the source does not pretend they are.

History and origin

An old South-West variety, "possibly originating in the Gironde" according to Pl@ntGrape. Its parentage is not established: the VIVC gives no marker-confirmed pedigree.

Its curve tells of a near-disappearance followed by a rescue. 952 hectares in 1958, 978 in 1968 — then the collapse, 319 hectares in 1979, the low point. And the recovery: 1,248 in 1998, 1,679 in 2008, 1,584 in 2018. It was caught just in time, at the moment when the appellations of the South-West stopped wanting to look like Bordeaux.

In the vineyard

It buds six days after Chasselas and ripens in the second period, three and a half weeks after it.

Its vigour is not given in this entry, and that is deliberate. Pl@ntGrape uses no word for vigour about it: it speaks of "somewhat irregular fertility" and of the long pruning this calls for. Fertility and vigour are two things — one counts bunches, the other measures how hard the wood grows — and confusing them is a mistake this corpus has already paid for on another variety. The field stays empty, which means "not established".

That irregularity has a named cause: "a not inconsiderable proportion of the buds fail to burst", what growers call blind buds. Hence the long pruning, which compensates by leaving more of them.

Its health profile is good: sound resistance to grey rot, little troubled by downy mildew. It is, however, susceptible to leafhoppers.

In the glass

Its aromatic profile is conditional, and that is what makes it interesting. The default register is "strongly marked (wild)". It is only "at good ripeness and with controlled yields" that the aromas turn "fruity (blackcurrant, red fruits)".

In other words: the fruit is not given, it is earned. A Fer Servadou picked underripe or cropped too heavily stays on its wild notes; grown properly, it gives blackcurrant. Few varieties state so plainly what the grower adds to them.

On the palate, "lively" and "fairly tannic": present acidity and tannin, over a middling colour. It is a wine of structure rather than of flesh, the opposite of what its rustic reputation suggests.

Great terroirs

Gaillac, where it is a principal variety for reds and rosés under the name Fer N, alongside Duras, Prunelard and Syrah. This is where it goes by Braucol.

Madiran, where its role is quite different: merely an accessory behind Tannat, which dominates the appellation. There it is called Pinenc, and it serves to soften a variety far more tannic than itself — which, for a grape described as "fairly tannic", gives the measure of Tannat.

Marcillac, in the Aveyron, where it is called Mansois. That appellation has no node in this corpus yet, and the share it holds there is not established here.

What it gets confused with

Tannat, its neighbour at Madiran, and the comparison is the best way to place them both. Tannat is more tannic, darker, slower to open. Fer is livelier, less deeply coloured, and brings the blend a freshness Tannat does not have.

Cabernet Franc, for the register. Both can show herbaceous notes when ripeness is short, and both give blackcurrant when it is there. Cabernet Franc is finer and more floral; Fer is rougher, more earthbound, and makes no claim otherwise.