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Loire 2003

Now and again I do try to brush up on my French a little, hopefully shifting my skill with this language a little further away from my current 'hopelessly mashed-up' stage to the much more advanced 'terrible but comprehensible'. I consider any sentence I construct that falls in the latter category, rather than the first, to be a great victory. With this in mind I'm always ready to pick up on new words, to uncover their meaning and perhaps put them into use myself. One such word that kept cropping up when I began to travel and taste more frequently in the Loire, with the aim of increasing Loire Valley coverage on Winedoctor, was canicule. It wasn't a word I was familiar with (for those in the know - no jokes about Loire Valley weather, please!) and it didn't - unlike many other words of Latin descent - immediately suggest a meaning.

A little research was required; I discovered that the word has celestial origins, being a derivative of Canicula, the name of a star perhaps now more commonly known as Sirius or, being part of the constellation Canis Major, the dog star. The annual arrival of Canicula in the pre-dawn night sky has long held significance for mankind; the ancient Egyptians would use this yearly event to predict the annual flooding of the Nile, whereas the Romans associated it with the favourable period of weather that ran from late July to late August. The phrase 'canicular days' might not be familiar, but 'dog days' - describing the warm and sultry weeks of late summer - perhaps is. Canicula was of such significance that it even received a mention from Pliny the Elder in Naturalis Historia, published circa AD 77-79, within which he associated the rise of the star with "the boiling of the seas and the fermenting of wines". By extension, the derivative canicule is now used to described any period of extreme heat, especially an atypical, perhaps newsworthy heatwave, and not solely the annual arrival of warm weather.

And what might the relevance of all this be to wine? I am sure it is already apparent. It was always the case that, as they vigneron muttered the word - some almost whispered it, as if it were somehow heretical - it was always the 2003 vintage they were pouring.

This was a meteorologically record-breaking vintage for the Loire as it was for much of France and indeed all Europe; France's longest river ran drier than ever, revealing even more of its ever-shifting sandbanks than usual (shown above, just upstream of Saumur) and long-standing records fell, as new all-time highs for a number of measures of annual temperature were set. And this was no narrow victory for 2003; sometimes the new records exceeded the old by several degrees, a remarkable difference considering many such records had stood for decades. Looking beyond the Loire for a moment, the weather station near Châteauneuf du Pape in Orange, for example, recorded a maximum temperature of 42.6ºC on August 12th (the heatwave was at its most dramatic during the first two weeks of August), trouncing the previous high of 40.7ºC which had stood since 1983. And the wines from across all of Europe's vineyards were touched by this heat. Looking back with many years of 2003 tasting experience it now seems some have faired well, but others show the effects of this dramatically warm vintage all too plainly. Low acidity has always been the most obvious and most likely problem, but as the wines age other issues have become apparent. In my Bordeaux 2003 review I note that terroir seems to have had a profound effect on how well the wines stand up to cellaring; at just 7-8 years of age, some - from warmer, well-drained soils - taste remarkably advanced.

But do not let me digress; this is a report on the Loire, not Bordeaux or the Rhône. There follows below an assessment of the 2003 growing season for the Loire Valley, region by region, based on information published by Météo France, the French government's weather service. The data comes from Météo stations in Nantes, Beaucouzé (just downstream of Angers, so fairly central to the Anjou appellations), Tours and Bourges (very close to Sancerre and Pouilly), and is complemented by viticultural information from the Préfet de Maine et Loire and the Conseil Général d'Indre et Loire, as well as some information direct from the growers. (20/9/11)