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Loire 2010

"There are lies, damn lies - and statistics", said Winston Churchill. Or at least I thought it was Churchill, until some brief but ultimately rather valuable research dissuaded me of this erroneous belief. As it turns out there are several far more likely sources for this quote, the first being Mark Twain, as this statement appears in his posthumously published Autobiography in 1924. Although further research reveals that Twain himself ascribed the quotation to Benjamin Disraeli, perhaps pointing us to the original source, although it seems that Twain got it wrong; there is no record of this phrase in any of Disraeli's speeches or writings. As it turns out, it may be that we should be attributing this most famous of quotations to the less well-known economist and politician Lord Courtney, who threw it out in a speech in New York, in 1895.

All of which goes to show that you should be careful taking what you read at face value...especially if it concerns statistics, of course.

We should bear this in mind when reviewing France's weather during the course of 2010. A quick glance at the summary of the year, produced by France's state-funded meteorological service Météo-France, shows that temperatures during 2010 were below average. For those who have read my recently published Bordeaux 2010 report - which documented an unseasonably cool July and August - this is perhaps not much of a surprise. Nevertheless the average temperature for 2010 is very different to the preceding years, considerably below rather than above average (as illustrated in this chart on the right), and it seems to suggest that the inhabitants of l'hexagone might have endured a rather wintry 2010. And yet I already know that this vintage has yielded many very promising wines, both from Bordeaux, as assessed during the primeur tastings in and around Bordeaux in April 2011, and from the Loire, as assessed during tastings in Angers in January 2011. So does this apparent paradox, that a vintage marked by cooler below average temperatures can yield potentially great wines (in at least two regions), mean that (a) cooler and less favourable weather has no effect on ripening of the fruit, the prevalence of vine diseases and the quality of the wines, or could it possibly be that (b) the statistic is misleading. Or, of course, could it be both?

The problem with the Météo-France temperature statistic is that the 'average' against which these data are benchmarked is the mean temperature across thirty years, running from 1971 to 2000 inclusive. This is a curious dataset; locate the 1971-2000 average on the chart above right and we can see that, up until 1987 most years are cooler, whereas from 1988 onward most years are remarkably warmer. There are a few exceptions of course, such as 1996, but as a generalisation it is true that annual temperatures in France have been much higher since 1988. Atypically high in fact; if I were to extrapolate the above chart out to the left, back to 1901, we would see that of the years 1901-1970 which predate those represented in the chart above, only twelve were warmer than the 1971-2000 average, whereas 58 were cooler. If the 1971-2000 'average' were truly representative, the distribution should be much more even than that. The natural conclusion is that the 1971-2000 average is atypically high, so my choice is (b) - the statistic is misleading.

And so although 2010 is a cooler than 'average' vintage we should bear in mind that the 'average' bar has been set too high - thanks to a fifteen-year run of warmer weather often soundbited as 'global warming'. In addition, we should also note that the temperature in 2010 is not wildly different to the 1971-2000 average. I accept that 0.25ºC below average for an entre nation across a whole year is a significant difference, but it pales into the shadows cast by the earlier years of the 20th century, which were most commonly 0.5-1.5ºC below 'average'. In fact the figure for 2010 is the same as that recorded in 1996, a year not exactly devoid of great wines, not only from the Loire - when the red wines and the Touraine Chenins were quite fine - but also from the left bank of Bordeaux and of course Champagne. In truth then 2010, a year of 'below average' temperatures, was in fact not a particularly 'cool' year; it was just not as warm as usual. And this conclusion is supported by examination of other data for the year. In 2010 some areas across northern France enjoyed 30% more hours of sunshine than the average (and the average here is based on a ten-year summation from 1991 to 2000, warm years, so an increase over this is certainly noteworthy). The viticultural regions along the Loire tended to be 10-20% above the average. And as for rainfall, this was a drier than average year, again perhaps not a surprise to those now familiar with the drought experienced by Bordeaux in 2010. Most regions experienced 80-100% of normal precipitation, some a little more and some a little less, but around the Loire it tended to be the latter.

We should also be aware of one other flaw hidden within this 'cool' statistic; it is an average temperature which reflects an entire year, and inspection of month-by-month data specifically for the Loire shows us that much of the chill that washed over the vineyards during 2010 was concentrated in the winter months. January was exceptionally cold, as was December, and this is true for all four regional reviews below. The spring months, running into June and July, were in fact generally warmer than the thirty-year average; I took advantage of this warm weather on Bastille Day (July 14th) when I sat on the grassy slopes alongside the château at Saumur (shown above) to watch the celebratory fireworks. The air remained comfortably warm long after the sun had set. Having said that, temperatures during late summer and autumn were only about average, and perhaps slightly cooler at some points. So yes, there were some cooler than expected temperatures; but nothing like the dramatic difference the statistic suggests.

So across France, and in particular the Loire, 2010 was a vintage marked by unremarkable but certainly not cold temperatures, plentiful sunshine and a little less rain than usual. All of which seems rather promising, especially in light of that initially worrisome statistic. But as Churchill once said "Statistics are like a drunk with a lamppost: they are used more for support than illumination". Although, after the aforementioned research, I have discovered it was more likely to have been Andrew Lang, a Scottish poet, who said that. You live and learn.

So, generalising over, here follows my guide to the 2010 growing season for the four main regions of the Loire Valley, based on data 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), complemented by viticultural information from the Préfet de Maine et Loire and the Conseil Général d'Indre et Loire, and also technical information from the oenology department of the Laboratoire de Touraine. (17/5/11)