Alain Cailbourdin, 2018 Update
You need to have some degree of resilience to be a vigneron, working to the tune of a drum beaten, in an occasionally irregular fashion, by the fickle Mother Nature. I recall meeting up with Alain Cailbourdin last year and asking him how the 2016 vintage had gone chez Cailbourdin. I could tell immediately, from the downtrodden expression I received in response, that it had not gone well. The problem had been the spring frost of course, which had succeeded in wiping out two-thirds of his crop. Thereafter the season had not been too troublesome, but nothing can compensate for the loss of most of your grapes.
Meeting up with Alain (pictured above) twelve months later, I posed the same question, and the answer came in a bright and breezy fashion.
“The 2017 vintage was better. This time we lost only one-third of the crop to the frost”.
It says something of Alain’s fortitude that this is his approach to his life as a vigneron. This has been a better vintage for him because, in his words, he lost ‘only’ one-third of his crop, even though this means over the two consecutive vintages he has coped with the loss of fruit equivalent to an entire harvest.
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