September is usually quite full-on, what with the start of the harvest and a new school year, but the 2017 edition has been bonkers. Not only have we completed the white harvest – which would normally be the case – but, as with the rest of Bordeaux this year, the reds are almost all in too. We’ve also hosted so many events at Bauduc we’ve had to recruit a live-in chef – what we’d have done without Elly, Lord knows. Keep reading
Tag Archives: Weather
The ghastly frost damage in Bordeaux
May 05 2017
The extent of the damage from the frost at the end of April is now becoming clear. Following on from three really good, generous vintages – culminating in the biggest Bordeaux harvest for more than a decade in 2016 – we’ve been brought back to earth with a very significant bump. Freezing temperatures in the early hours of Thursday 27 April, and to a lesser extent the morning before, have wiped out the crop in many vineyards, right at the start of the growing season. ‘The Lord giveth…’ you might think. ‘C’est la nature’ a neighbour said, with a consoling shrug of the shoulders.
Until last week, I don’t think I’ve ever taken the risk of Spring frosts that seriously. Really damaging frosts in Bordeaux are rare – the stuff of legends, such as the terrible one in April 1991, which almost killed off the harvest, and the even worse one in 1956, which killed off a lot of vines, notably on the Right Bank around St-Emilion.
We did, though, have a warning at exactly the same time last year, when temperatures dropped to freezing before sunrise (on 29 April, here). A few Bordeaux vineyards took a hit, but nothing compared to the losses in Champagne, Chablis and the Loire.
Being based further south, I’m less of ‘G for Gel’ man than ‘G for Grêle’. As anyone who is familiar with our tales of woe, it’s the threat of hail that sends me into a nervous spin. We lost over half the crop in May 2009 and again in August 2013 to hail, so it’s understandable.
But all that changed last week. ’Le gel dévaste les vignes de Gironde’ ran the headline in the Sud-Ouest last Friday, 29 April. And it wasn’t an exaggeration. Keep reading
How the weather shaped Bordeaux 2016
March 31 2017
The wine trade and press descend on Bordeaux next week for the official En Primeur tastings of the latest vintage. There’s little doubt, to my mind, that they’ll find a great many exciting wines, both in the Royal Circle and in the more affordable stalls. At the top end, the wines will not be cheap when prices emerge later on but there’ll be scores of others that offer terrific bang for your buck – or even for your pound. Here, as a precursor to these tastings of young wines from barrel, is a graphical look at how the weather made the vintage.
Here’s how the vintage panned out. I’ll start with a few graphs and tables, and then show a few photos to give you an idea of what was happening in the vineyard. Keep reading
Red harvest at Bauduc by hand – in pictures
October 26 2016
The harvest was completed at Bauduc last Friday, 21st October. We picked the remaining block of Cabernet Sauvignon by hand, just as we did when Rick Stein came to film the opening episode of his Long Weekends series for the BBC a year ago. (Where does the time go?)
It’s been a long harvest in 2016 and strange to think that the first rows we picked – also by hand – were the 10-year old Semillon vines for our sparkling cremant in the next door field as far back as the 12th September. (Funny, that seems like an age ago.) Keep reading
Red harvest at Bauduc by machine – in pictures
October 20 2016
We harvested the Merlots, mostly by machine, during the week of 10th October. The grapes looked terrific and one advantage of bringing them in cold by machine at the crack of dawn, is putting them into a chilled stainless steel tank for a cold soak for a few days before starting the fermentation.
Some of the great chateaux we most admire, such as l’Evangile in Pomerol, Smith Haut Lafitte in Pessac-Leognan and Malescot St-Exupery in Margaux, also like to do a pre-fermentation ’cold maceration’. Their pickers snip the bunches into crates during the day and the winery staff drive the pallets of crates into a chiller room, usually overnight, before de-stemming and sorting the bunches and transferring the grapes – cold – into tanks the following day. Keep reading
Quinneys picking – in pictures
October 13 2016
We picked all our Merlot this week, so we’ve just got our Cabernet to go and that’ll be that. More on the red harvest at Bauduc in next week’s missive, suffice to say that we’ve been lucky with the weather. It’s been dry and sunny until yesterday afternoon, which is good for bringing in the grapes and, of course, for taking photos. It’s also unusual to have all the children at home at this time of year, so it’s only fair that we put together a gratuitous family album. Keep reading
Bordeaux 2016 – vines in May compared to previous years
May 25 2016
23 May 2016 – a little later than 2015 but reasonable for the time of year
I’ve taken a picture of the vineyard in front of the chateau on the 23rd May each year. The date has no special significance – it just happened that way – and the pictures are as much for my records as anything else. They provide a useful comparison as to how these Merlot vines have advanced since budburst at the beginning of April. It’s always shortly before the important flowering. Keep reading
August rain: much needed refreshment
September 02 2015
Forget the rain dance. Our review at the end of July, following six weeks of drought, was called ’Time to borrow some rain’ and it did the trick: Mother Nature acted on the collective response of ’you’re bloody welcome to it’ with some heavy showers in August. In fact, we had more rain at Bauduc in August than in the three previous months put together. Conveniently, the last instalment of rain was on 31 August, which is just as well.
Here are some pics and, yes, a weather graph or two.
At Bauduc, we had half the normal rainfall in May, June and July combined, then twice the normal rain (or the average over 30 years) in August. No rain since the (UK) Bank Holiday Monday, with none forecast for the first ten days of September.
Bordeaux 2015 – dry and sunny, still
August 06 2015
Véraison, when the grapes change colour, is in full flow in Bordeaux. The dry and sunny weather has continued into the first week of August, with a welcome blip of rain in the early hours of Tuesday this week. With most of France taking a holiday, there’s a lull in the work in the vineyard between the hard labour of handling the vines from Spring to Summer, and the build up to the late September harvest. (The whites will start earlier.)
There’s always some tidying up that can be done now, like the éclaircissage seen here at Chateau Margaux this week – the removal of excess bunches to prevent overcrowding; we’ll see more green harvesting as the veraison draws to a close, when it becomes easier to spot the bunches that are lagging behind. Meanwhile the trimming of leaves with a Japanese sword, as at Chateau Léoville Poyferré (below), isn’t something I’d practice at home. Keep reading
Time to borrow some rain
July 29 2015
As you know, farmers are never happy, so forgive us for wanting just a smidgen of rain as we’ve had precious little since the second week of June. It’s also been blisteringly hot for long periods and, as few people realise, us Appellation Contrôlée vignerons are not allowed to irrigate our crops. Still, other than the younger vines on drier soils, the rows look remarkably green and lush here, so we remain positive for the Autumn harvest.
We’ve seen half the normal rainfall since the new season’s growth kicked off with budbreak at the start of April. The Autumn and Winter of 2014/2015 brought 25% less rain (356 mm from October 2014 to February 2015, inclusive) than the 30-year average (470 mm), so it’s not as if we began with a water surplus. Since then we’ve had much less rain than normal, each and every month:
March 2015 40 mm v 64 mm (30 year Bordeaux average)
April 2015 – 51 mm v 78 mm (ditto)
May 2015 – 26.5 mm v 79.8 mm
June 2015 – 46 mm v 63 mm
July 2015 – 15.5 mm to date v 50 mm
Total since budbreak, April to July 2015 – 139 mm v 271 mm
Note that these figures are local (20 kms SE of the city) and may not be the same for all Bordeaux regions, although it’s a similar story elsewhere – the last six weeks have been dry and hot everywhere in Bordeaux. Other areas, such as Margaux, Léognan, St-Emilion and Blaye, have also had half the normal rainfall since the beginning of April, or even less. The Northern Médoc has seen more rain than us, and that was in April, May and early June. I’ll publish the stats from other areas shortly. Keep reading