Wine and Song: The Upper Loire, 2026. The 2022 Vintage
This is the final instalment of tasting notes on the wines of France’s Massif Central to be published in 2026. In this report I focus on the 2022 vintage, but I also include notes on wines from a number of prior vintages, from 2021, 2020 and 2019. To read my introduction to this report, with a background to the region and its wines as well as brief primers on the four main appellations, see Wine and Song: The Upper Loire. Other reports cover the 2024 and 2023 vintages.
Before presenting my tasting notes, a short briefing on the 2022 vintage as it pertains to this region is warranted.
The 2022 & Older Vintages
The 2022 vintage was one of extremes, with a long spell of hot and dry weather, leading to early maturity in the fruit, and thus an early harvest.
The figures for Clermont-Ferrand bear this out, with just 469.2 mm of rainfall across the year, more than 100 mm below the average. After a mild winter May was warmer and drier than average, and the flowering preceded well.
Much of the rain that fell came in June, which saw over 195 mm of precipitation – nearly half the year’s paltry total – in one month. This was caused by stormy weather associated with the June 2022 heatwave. The weather station at Clermont-Ferrand recorded its highest-ever daily average temperature of 23.4ºC for June, smashing the previous record of 22.6ºC which had stood since June 12th 1931. This prolonged period of heat was interspersed with a sequence of violent thunderstorms each of which brought a short but intense period of rainfall. Not only was the rainfall intense, it was localised; one village could receive as much as 60 mm in a day while another, only a few kilometres away, remained dry.
