Bordeaux 2012: Winter & Spring
The winter of 2011 running into 2012 saw some generally mild weather, with rather unexciting temperature lows in December 2011 and January 2012. Things only really started to bite in February when the temperatures dropped to way below the expected norm. Even so, the minimum temperatures were only a few degrees below zero, and no vines will have suffered as a result. Such a cold snap may well have done some good in fact, killing off vineyard pests and disease-causing micro-organisms.
As spring arrived the weather pattern for the beginning of the year set in. April was remarkably wet, with rain on the majority of days during this month. Granted, some days saw only a millimetre or two, but by the end of the month the total rainfall was 179mm, more than double the average. Having spent a week in Bordeaux in April 2012 for the 2011 vintage primeurs I was fortunate to miss most of this rain; I returned to the UK on Thursday 5th April, seeing just a little drizzle on my final day, while Friday 6th was the second wettest day of the month, with 28 mm recorded. The temperatures also remained on the cool side, although as such comparisons are now made against a new, much warmer average (the French Météo service having shifted to an average based on the years 1981 to 2010 this year, the previous benchmark having been an average based on the years from 1971 to 2000) this may well give a slightly false impression that April was ‘cold’. Daily highs were generally between 13ºC and 17ºC; not exactly freezing, but certainly cooler than hoped for and expected. This cooler-than-average and wetter-than-average weather conspired to interfere with the April budbreak, which was slow as a result. And a late budbreak, because of the steady progression of the vine’s growth and the fruit development throughout the year, generally means a later, more risky harvest.
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