Bordeaux 2018: Flowering
The first flowers were seen (by me, anyway) on May 24th, just before that dreadfully wet weekend; by that time I had been in Bordeaux for the best part of a week, prior to heading up to the Loire Valley for some tastings there. Throughout the entire week everybody had denied the appearance of any flowers, my question answered in every instance by a shake of the head. But then, on what was almost my final day in the region, I took a walk in the vineyard of Château Lafleur with Baptiste Guinaudeau and Omri Ram, principally to look at some of their Cabernet Franc vines, many of which have been propagated by sélection massale in-house, and then grafted onto pre-existent rootstock. And there they were, the vintage’s first two flowers (pictured further down the page).
The rain continued unabated during the last week of May and the first half of June, but the end was in sight. During the second half of the month it was largely dry, at least until a downpour on the very last day before July arrived. Despite these very wet conditions during late May and early June, on the whole the flowering proceeded well. The conditions were humid but warm, not bad conditions for flowering as low temperatures are much more of a threat to the process than rain or humidity. A number in the region do report some loss of crop due to coulure (aborted flowering) though, but it was very sporadic; I found when asking that one domaine would attribute perhaps 10% of their loss of volume in this vintage to coulure, and yet their neighbours would deny seeing any coulure at all. This coulure, although not universal, is the second of several factors contributing to low yields in this vintage.
Summer
July arrived, and as I indicated in my introduction to this vintage report, so did the year’s best weather. Indeed, from early July though to early October there was a persistent period of bright sunshine and clear skies which was nothing less than remarkable.
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