Bordeaux 2010: Winter & Spring
The 2009 vintage yielded some of the most remarkable wines I have ever tasted from Bordeaux (including those high-alcohol right-bankers which gave the vintage its aura of inconsistency), and the high quality I found in many of them was perhaps a given after such a remarkable growing season. It was a year of dry weather and steady progress in the vineyard, but such calm conditions could never last forever of course. Once the harvest had passed the skies darkened, marking the arrival of somewhat less charming weather; November saw more than double the usual volume of water fall from the skies over Bordeaux, and the precipitation persisted though December and January, albeit in less exceptional volumes. Although the Bordelais did not know it at the time, this rain was perhaps the saviour of the vintage to come; for 2010 was a year marked not by a very steady progression in the vineyards as had been seen in 2009, but by much more erratic weather, in particular periods of extreme drought.
In the months that followed only March and June saw any decent rainfall; at other times the vines would be dependent on reserves of deeper groundwater, reserves now nicely augmented by the winter rains. The winter was also very cold, never a bad thing for ensuring dormancy of the vines during pruning, and for killing off vineyard pests – provided the temperatures aren’t so low as kill off the vines as well of course. But this was no 1956. Nevertheless Bordeaux did see some snow, and even though the volume and duration of cover was insignificant compared to the snow drifts I had to deal with here in Scotland every morning for several weeks, snowfall in Bordeaux – especially when that snow lingers on the ground for a whole week, as it did in this case – is extraordinarily rare.
