A Harvest Visit to Château Brown, 2012: The 2012 Vintage
Having learnt of recent and planned developments at Château Brown, it is time to turn our attention to the 2012 harvest. I arrived at Brown hoping to find some picking ongoing, but it wasn’t to be. The picking of the white grapes had begun on September 11th and finished on September 25th, a full week before I arrived. The red grapes were still on the vine, awaiting harvest. That has since begun, but more on that in a moment. First, a look back at the growing season as it panned out in 2012 at Château Brown.
As readers who have already discovered my reports from Preuillac and Sociando-Mallet will already know, the 2012 vintage has been a difficult one here and across all Bordeaux. There has been a lot of hard work in the vineyards, the weather forcing Jean-Christophe to spray against mildew several times early in the year. This is true across the entire region, and sales of fungicide and copper sulphate (which does the same job on the organic and biodynamic vineyards) will be up this year – I suspect the 2012 vintage will be the most sprayed and treated vintage since at least 2007. Although the weather turned in mid-July, and has been much more favourable since, the concern was ripening in the shortened time frame that remained following a delayed and irregular flowering. As a consequence, Jean-Christophe carried out extensive green harvesting in order to decrease yields and hopefully increase fruit quality.
First, a look at progress with the white wines, before moving onto the reds.
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