Bordeaux 2016: Winter & Spring
Ask any drinker of French wine which was the warmest vintage in recent times and many will still say 2003. For several years now I have enjoyed confounding sommeliers, cavistes and even other critics who state this fact – which to be fair does seem a dead cert if you remember the summer heatwave of 2003 – by pointing out that for the country as a whole, 2011 was considerably warmer, with an annual mean temperature that was 1.0ºC above the thirty-year average. As it happens, however, even this little factoid is now out of date, as 2014 was warmer, at 1.2ºC above the average, and 2015 was close behind, at 1.1ºC above. All three were warmer overall than 2003. The wines didn’t end up baked, soupy and loose, the overarching style of many (but not all) wines from the 2003 vintage, though, because the warmer-than-usual temperatures which pushed the average skywards came at unusual times, in spring or in autumn, rather than in a baking summer heatwave,
The year 2016 was also an incredibly warm one for France as a nation, but thankfully temperatures across the entire year did not quite reach the same heady heights as these aforementioned vintages, and it was a long way behind 2003. The second half of the year was marked by a particularly prolonged period of warm and dry weather, but it was balanced out by much cooler weather during the first half of the year, as well as cooler night-time temperatures. As a result the average temperature across the entirety of 2016 was still warmer than thirty-year average, but only by 0.5ºC. This places it, in terms of overall temperatures, somewhere between 2006 and 2009.
Of course, the annual average temperature is a very coarse measure of a year’s weather. To get a closer idea of the 2016 vintage in Bordeaux, we need to home in on the region itself, and the nuances of the season.
