Bordeaux 2020: Weather Report
As is customary I began this Bordeaux report, concerning the recently tasted 2020 vintage, with the assistance of Monsieur Propriétaire, who witnessed this vintage’s miraculous mid-June turn-around first-hand. This was yet another year in which the Bordeaux region faced month after month of wet and miserable weather, the switch for summer eventually flicked on midway through June. There then followed several months of warm and dry weather, replacing the interminable rain with a drought, but thankfully no great heatwave. Occasional showers of rain freshened up the vines here and there, or at least tried to, but essentially the good weather persisted all the way through to harvest.
Obviously that is an over-simplification, and I will explore the growing season in more detail over the next couple of pages, but before I do that it is worth reflecting on the pattern of this growing season for a moment. Readers with good memories will recall this long-wet then long-dry pattern of weather was also seen in 2018, when the switch was flipped in July, and in 2016, when it was in June. This means, even if it is not the norm, this new sequence of persistently wet followed by persistently dry weather is an increasingly frequent pattern for the region.
It is not just observers of the most recent Bordeaux vintage who have noticed this. As mentioned in my recent 2018 in-bottle tasting report, a team of climate researchers led by Santer et al, published in Science, lay the blame of this new weather pattern at the feet of climate change. As temperatures warm, summer temperatures are accelerating more rapidly than those in winter, producing hot dry summers and mild wet winters, with a sudden and awkward shift from one to the other. Bordeaux (and perhaps other French wine regions) should therefore be prepared for more vintages like this, the early mild weather raising the risk of frost and mildew, the later arid growing conditions bringing its own viticultural challenges.
But let’s home in now on 2020, which gave the Bordelais not only a very disturbed growing season to deal with, but which also cast a viral pandemic in their path. It was a steep learning curve; the Bordelais have some skill at anticipating shifts in the weather, predicting the arrival of mildew and knowing when to spray, but I am certain nobody in the region had a ready-made plan for how to keep an 80-hectare vineyard running in a time of national lockdown.
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