Bordeaux 2016: Summer & Autumn
Although the flowering had gone smoothly, up until this point the 2016 vintage was far from promising. It was June 23rd that was the turning point. The UK was waking up to news that by a whisker the country had voted to leave the EU. The value of the pound plummeted in response and it remains weak today. This is not an irrelevant political snippet; the weak pound means that UK buyers will be paying more for their primeur wines this year, in a vintage when release prices are also surely set to rise. Meanwhile, in Bordeaux, the locals were waking up to clear blue skies and sunshine. Summer had arrived, and not before time.
After months of cool and wet weather, July seems to have established a new direction of travel. It was warmer than average, the highest temperature for the month (at the Mérignac weather station, at least) being 38.5ºC, recorded on 19th July. This was just 0.3ºC below the record of 38.8ºC, set in 1990. It was also suddenly very dry, with just 12.7 mm rain during the entire month, and most of that fell on July 30th. Unsurprisingly the vines now made a sudden leap forward, being eager to get on with growing and ripening their fruit; after months of cool and wet weather they were ready to take advantage of the combination of warm, sunny weather and the plentiful supply of groundwater.
During August the weather remained dry and like July it was super-warm, with temperatures way above average, although not breaking any records which were – for this month – set in 2003. And again the skies were free of cloud, with high levels of sunshine (313 hours against an average of 241 hours) with just 11.3 mm of rain at Mérignac, mostly on August 4th. The result of this very long spell of warm and sunny weather is that the soils were now drying up, and the supply of groundwater to the increasingly thirsty vines was no longer guaranteed. Vignerons who one month before had done soil resistivity analyses showing them to be water-rich, were now taken aback by fresh studies showing them to be very dry. The rapid shift to a water-poor state was a real surprise. Up until late June the work in the vineyard was (for those vineyard managers who are reactive to conditions, and don’t simply do everything to rote) aimed at helping vines to cope with excess water, by allow vegetative growth, to increase the transpiration area provided by the leaves, the sort of work seen in 2013. Suddenly the work changed to helping the plants through dry conditions, topping off vegetative growth, thinning down the growth around the sides, removing side shoots and so on, the sort of work seen in 2010.
