A cold snap threatens 2021’s French vintage

Unseasonally cold weather has been giving me pause for thought because I was hoping to plant out my tomatoes in the polytunnel during the week. These plants, raised from seed, are too precious to risk and they remain swathed in bubble wrap until things get a little toastier.

The wine producers of France have been having a terrible time of late with frost. In Rully, down in the Côte Chalonnaise of Burgundy, temperatures dropped to between -3ºC and -6ºC and as it happens I’ve been hugely enjoying some wines from there in the lovely 2019 vintage. It’s bad news for Burgundy, where at least 50 per cent of the potential crop has been wiped out. Whites will be worse affected than reds as Chardonnay vines were that bit further advanced than the Pinot Noir when the cold struck.

In the Rhône it looks like as much as 80 per cent has been destroyed and in some sub-regions it’s pretty much 100 per cent. Nowhere seems to have escaped.

This is very bad news for the 600,000 people employed in the French wine industry and it won’t be a bundle of laughs for us consumers either. The 2021 vintage could turn out to be fabulous, of course, but even with the greatest luck, it’s going to be small and expensive.

There will be a knock-on effect on recent vintages, too, as the 2018s, 2019s and 2020s all become that much more desirable. In Burgundy, these years are all good, with the 2019s showing a lot of charm even at this early stage. Bordeaux’s 2020s are good to excellent, the other two very decent. I’m not suggesting that you rush out and secure Bordeaux’s crus classées, because it’s a long time since I did that myself; nor the serious stuff from the Burgundy’s Côte d’Or because I’ve never even considered doing that.

No, I just have a few smart choices to suggest. First of all, Bill Kelly of Kelly’s Resort Hotel, home of Ireland’s best French and most generous wine list, has taken delivery of 40,000 bottles for his retail customers and I strongly urge any lover of the good stuff to download his latest Wine Sale list at lamarine.ie/wineshop.

I ordered half a dozen of each of the Rullys mentioned below and they are super wines at very decent prices. I’ll savour them while dreaming of a night or two at Kelly’s when the world becomes safer.