Petit Verdot

Identity

Petit Verdot is Bordeaux's fifth grape, the one always spoken of as a percentage. Two, three, sometimes five per cent of a Médoc blend — and yet every one of the great communal cahiers des charges names it.

What it contributes is out of proportion to its share: colour, tannin, and a floral note the Cabernets do not give.

A problem of timing

Its rarity is not a matter of taste but of dates, and they are counter-intuitive.

Pl@ntGrape places it at bud burst three days after Chasselas — early — and at mid-season ripeness, three and a half to four weeks after it. On the national scale, this is not a late variety.

But the scale that counts here is the Médoc's, where it ripens after Cabernet Sauvignon, itself already late. To bud early and finish after everyone else is to occupy the vine for the whole season: exposed to spring frost at the start, to autumn rain at the end. Add coulure, to which it is susceptible, and it becomes clear why it holds only the warmest gravel rises — the only sites that carry it through.

The consequence is blunt: in a cool vintage it does not ripen, and the blend is made without it.

What it puts in the glass

Pl@ntGrape says this, and nothing more: "very powerful wines, rich, deeply coloured and tannic".

The structure follows — high acidity, high tannin, full body — and that combination explains its use. A grape that keeps its acidity while accumulating sugar and tannin is exactly what you add to a blend to hold it up.

The three descriptors on this entry — violet, blueberry, liquorice — are tasting readings, not quotations: no source opened for this entry gives an aroma profile for the variety. Violet is the note it is blended in for, and the only one a taster attributes to Petit Verdot in a Médoc.

Where it is named

Throughout the Médoc, and always as an accessory: Margaux, Pauillac, Saint-Julien, Saint-Estèphe, Haut-Médoc, and Pessac-Léognan in the Graves. No appellation raises it to principal variety.

It is a singular position: a grape everyone permits, nobody leads with, and whose disappearance would change the taste of wines that do not carry its name.

What this entry does not say

It does not tell its Médoc history, nor the renewed interest it has attracted over recent decades, nor its uses outside France, where warmer climates ripen it without difficulty and where it is sometimes made as a varietal. None of those three has been verified for this entry, and this corpus prefers a stated gap to a plausible claim.