Loire 2013 First Taste: Touraine
In Vouvray, 2011 was a rather damp and dreary affair, with a cool summer and harvest rain making for a difficult vintage. So after the further disappointment of 2012, a vintage in which the growers brought in fruit with low potentials, good enough for sec and sparkling wines but not really for demi-sec, and certainly not for the great moelleux cuvées for which the appellation is rightly famed, it was only natural that they had all their fingers and toes crossed for better luck in 2013. What they needed was a summer of warm and benevolent weather, perhaps with a little shower of rain here and there to protect the vines from hydric stress. What they didn’t need – indeed, what nobody needed – was a devastating hailstorm that tore through the vineyards, ripping off leaves and even, so large were the balls of ice that fell upon the vines, snapping branches. The storm cut suddenly and indiscriminately through vineyards and through livelihoods like the slash of a giant, badly-wielded and rough-edged scalpel. One minute before the storm, all had been going well; one minute after, much of Vouvray was a scene of vinous devastation.
For those worst affected, it was a disaster. The 2013 vintage will live long in their memories, sadly for all the wrong reasons. Many vineyards escaped the hail though, and so most (but certainly not all) still had something to work with. And for the vines that escaped the hail, the remainder of the year was not so unkind. And so we should look closely at Vouvray, as well as all the other Touraine appellations in this, the third of my regional vintage reports for Loire 2013. Below, I describe the weather and the conditions at harvest time, based on my visits to the region during 2013 and on reports from Vincent Carême and Peter Hahn and, looking beyond Vouvray, from Matthieu Baudry, Jean-Martin Dutour (both in Chinon), Sébastien David (in Bourgueil) as well as Vincent Ricard and Thierry Michaud (both in the generic Touraine appellation). Weather data, where included, were recorded at the weather station at Tours and published by Météo France. On the next page, I follow with my first tasting notes for 2013.
Weather Report
The month of February was unremarkable, whereas March was colder, with day-time temperatures well below the mean. April was cold, but it warmed up a little around the middle of month, with another warmer peak towards the end. This was not maintained through May though, when temperatures were lower than expected (day-time temperatures were more than 2ºC below average), and there was also heavy rainfall (the volume was nearly 50% higher than average). Temperatures were particularly low towards the end of the month, especially on the 18th, 19th and 24th. As elsewhere, this cold and unfavourable weather did nothing to advance the growth and development of the vines. It was already clear that this was going to be a late harvest.
