Loire 2019: Winter
Driving from one Muscadet domaine to the next in December 2018, visiting Manuel Landron and Marion Pescheux at Complemen’Terre, and Fréd Lailler at the famed Domaine Brégeon, my spirits were severely dampened by the weather. The morning had started off grey and drizzly, the air heavy with a thick, misty haze. By the time I reached my final appointment of the morning, before catching a flight from Nantes back to Edinburgh, the wind had whipped itself up into a frenzy and the rain was both heavy and horizontal. In truth it wasn’t just my spirits that were dampened; having unintentionally left my jacket in Vouvray when visiting Vincent Carême seven days earlier it wasn’t long before I looked like a drowned rat. This was how 2018 drew to a close in this corner of the Loire Valley. November brought heavy rainfall, as did December (although further upstream, December rainfall was closer to the norm).
It was only in 2020 that the vineyards had a chance to dry out, with January, February and March all experiencing lower than average rainfall. Visiting the vineyards of Domaine Belargus on February 3rd, calling in at Savennières, Quarts de Chaume, the Coteau des Treilles and St Lambert du Lattay I recall a day that was dry, bright and bitterly cold; weather which required hat and coat (I had a replacement jacket by this time), and those of us who came equipped with gloves looked particularly smug. It felt like proper winter weather, but it did not last long. By the third week of March many Ligérian vignerons were reporting budburst; Emmanuel Ogereau saw new buds on his Chenin Blanc on the banks of the Layon by March 20th, and similarly Philippe Boucard of Lamé Delisle Boucard saw that his Cabernet Franc vines on warmer more gravelly terroirs in Bourgueil were similarly springing into life. This is a very early budburst, and of course it left the vines exposed to the risk of frost. And the vignerons, sadly, did not have to wait too long for that.
Spring and the Frosts
It was only two weeks later when the first of several frosts hit, on April 4th, a date seared into the memory of Emmanuel Ogereau as it was his birthday. This was not a frost in Anjou alone though; temperatures dropped below freezing across Muscadet as well as Anjou, including Savennières (also badly hit in 2017), and although parts of Touraine and the appellations further upstream also saw the mercury dip the damage was patchy and petered out, some parts (such as Vouvray) getting away with it while others (such as Montlouis) were hit.
