Loire 2019 at Four Years
The 2019 harvest was a busy one. Despite a variety of insults thrown at the vines by La Dame Nature, ruthlessly thinning the crop, most vignerons along the length and breadth of the Loire Valley still had a decent quantity of fruit to pick, and they toiled at top speed to bring it all in, especially as the weather turned drizzly.
I flitted from vineyard to vineyard, checking out the bunches as they came in. I recall a sunny day in Vouvray, the bunches sweet and ripe, although there were quite a few sunburnt grapes left on the vine. And another sunny day in Chinon, the fruit loaded into trailers lined up in the shade of some overhanging trees, each waiting in turn for their chance at the press. Then a more drizzly day in Bourgueil, the pickers – suitably clad in dark green waterproofs – working at a blistering pace to bring everything in. They loaded their grapes into what seemed to be a repurposed amusement-park pedalo (if that means nothing to you, a paddle boat), mounted atop a trailer. All that was missing to complete this surreal image was the gigantic swan’s head (or unicorn’s head, or dragon’s head – it depends which creature features in your childhood pedalo-memories, I suppose) atop the craft.
Pedalo dreams aside, it was clear the vintage held much promise.
But that was then, and this is now. Coming back to this vintage four years on from the snipping of the secateurs, how have these wines been getting along since? And, more importantly, how are they tasting today?
Answering the first question is easy. The fermentations finished, and the newly made wines made the move from cuve to barrel, and ultimately from barrel to bottle. Some of these bottles then found their way into my cellar in Scotland. Not as many as in the past, admittedly, because many top wines of the Loire Valley are difficult to track down in the UK, so I used to source them in France and import them to UK myself. Now, though, new post-Brexit rules prevent doing this with any meaningful quantities. At least my cellar is starting to shrink a little (this is perhaps a positive development).
