Bordeaux 2017: Weather Report
Weather watchers across France will remember 2017 as being a very warm and dry year, with unseasonably high temperatures throughout almost the entire twelve months. The average temperature in 2017 was 13.4ºC, which was 0.8ºC above the average. This puts 2017 in fifth place in the ‘warmest year’ league table, in a family of warmer-than-average years with siblings including 2015, 2014 and 2011, all of which were also much warmer overall than the thirty-year-average. And it has a distant cousin in 2003, a year where the heat came not in the form of unusually mild winter, spring or autumn weather, but in the shape of a blistering summer heatwave.
This is not a new phenomenon. France is currently experiencing an unprecedented period of warm and dry weather that has been ongoing since at least 1959. Nevertheless there is certainly a suggestion of an upward trend, as the very warmest years – those I have mentioned above – are clearly also the most recent. And we can see the effect this has on wine in both my regions of interest. The Loire Valley has just banked its fourth good red vintage in a row, a quite singular occurrence. Here in Bordeaux harvests are earlier (not always, admittedly) and alcohol levels are climbing. And while wider availability of improved vegetal material (better clones), a more thoughtful approach to the management of vine diseases, better hands-on viticulture and lower yields than were historically obtained all no doubt contribute to these changes, it would be foolish to say that warmer, sunnier, drier weather hasn’t also played some part.
This then is story of 2017, a year in which nationally (the story in Bordeaux is a little more nuanced) every month was warmer than the historical average bar January and September. A year in which February, March and September were, across France, more then 2ºC warmer than the norm. A year in which the temperatures during spring and summer were the second highest recorded since 1900. You might assume, therefore, that this vintage weather report will be an uneventful tale of clear skies, sweetly ripe berries and deliriously contented winemakers, the breadth of their tannin-stained smiles matched only by the breadth of sciolism exhibited by Monsieur Propriétaire. Sadly, such an assumption would be incorrect. The weather in Bordeaux was a little more up and down than this national summary, and the 2017 vintage was also, as I suspect most readers are already aware, blighted by frost. The region saw similar destruction to that experienced by the Loire Valley in this year, making this the most frost-bitten Bordeaux vintage since the catastrophe of 1991, about which I wrote (long after the fact) in my 1991 Twenty Years On tasting report.
Here then, just as I did in my 2017 Loire Valley report, I will cast the spotlight onto the frost as well as the story of the subsequent growing season and the harvest. Let’s kick off in the winter that straddled 2016 and 2017.
