Loire 2016 First Taste: Central Vineyards
The 2016 frost was a lottery, wiping out some vineyards while barely touching others. More than once the waters of the Loire itself seem to have acted as a barrier between the two, symbolically at least. Downstream in Touraine, for example, the vignerons of devastated Montlouis look out across the Loire in the direction of Vouvray, which mostly escaped great harm (although it would be wrong to say the vineyards went untouched). Both the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ must soldier on, making the best of what they have, but it is much more difficult for some than for others.
Here in France’s Central Vineyards we have a similar situation. Visiting Pierre Martin in Sancerre at the height of summer in 2016, I asked him what percentage of his crop he estimated he had lost in the frost, but he seemed a little confused by the question. As it turned out his losses had been minimal, so small in fact that he hadn’t really sat down to figure out what the damage was as a proportion of his usual crop. “I will find out when it comes to the harvest”, he concluded. His was a very different situation to that of many of his peers on the opposite bank of the Loire, in the vineyards of the Pouilly-Fumé appellation, where the frost bit hardest. Here, many vignerons lost between 70% and 90% of their crop in the space of a few frosty hours.
The Central Story
Nobody I spoke to in Sancerre reported significant frost damage. The experience of Alphonse Mellot Junior was typical. “We had a little bit of frost in April, but there was no great loss. Afterwards we had beautiful weather”. The yields on the Alphonse Mellot domaine were 46 hl/ha for the white varieties, and 29 hl/ha for the reds, both figures well within normal limits. Further south in the Côtes de la Charité, where Alphonse also has vines, it was a different story; here the vineyards were decimated by the frost.
