Andrew Jefford
‘It should be too hot for all this quality’
Something strange is going on, at least in France. We’re all beneficiaries. And when we try to account for this strangeness, it’s hard not to think of a blonde-haired girl and three bowls of breakfast porridge. More on Goldilocks later. Heat is the issue, and its effect on vintage quality. It won’t have escaped the attention of Decanter readers that we are into an amazing six-vintage run in most French regions since 2015, with only 2017 letting the side down.
It’s early to call 2020, but first signs are encouraging: good to great, let’s provisionally say, with growers in Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Loire, Alsace and northern Rhône all thrilled with results. 2019 looks plausibly great too, and unquestionably very good in every region, with almost no exceptions; both 2019 and 2020 are, remarkably, fresh in style as well as concentrated, bright and expressive. 2018 is richer and more baroque, but it will endure and may indeed improve when it has calmed down: there is potential greatness there. The fresh allure of 2016 makes that a very good vintage, and great in parts; 2015 is straightforwardly good. Funds allowing, we all have lots of lovely wine to buy and to cellar in spring 2021.
So what’s strange? Simply this: it should be too hot for all this quality.
Remember 2003, thought at the time to be ‘the hottest year since the Big Bang’? Remember how odd and disappointing some 2003 wines were (notably in Burgundy and Pomerol)? If you bought 2009 Bordeaux, have you started them yet? If so, their extravagant sweetness and ripeness, just tiptoeing over the edge sometimes, won’t have escaped you.
Yet 2020, 2018, 2014 and 2019 are (in that order) the hottest years in France since 1900, significantly eclipsing 2003. 2003’s all-time heat record of 44.1°C was pulverised by almost 2°C in late June 2019 (46°C at Vérargues near where I live in Hérault on 28 June). 2018 was a hotter summer in northern France than both 2003 and 2009; 2019 smashed the 2003 pan-French heat record repeatedly in July and August in many regions, Champagne included; 2020 in Bordeaux saw the warmest April since 1900, the driest summer since 1959 and more rapid heat accumulation over summer than either 2009 or 2010. The wines should be staggering and sprawling. They aren’t.
There are a number of explanations. First, you have to look closely at the climate details. In both 2018 and 2020, for example, spring was very wet, and that helped the vines cope with prodigious summer drought and heat, as did timely August rains in most regions in 2020. The heat spikes of 2019 switched on and off more quickly than 2003’s heatwave, which remains the most severe ever recorded in France for thermal intensity and duration.
Growers, too, have quickly adapted their practices in anticipation of heat, whereas they were caught on the hop in 2003. Leaf-thinning and green harvesting, for example, are practised more circumspectly, and canopies are shadier; everyone is now ready for an August harvest; freshness is the vinification watchword, with few still chasing surmaturité. It’s possible, too, that the vines themselves are adapting to a changing climate in ways that we don’t yet understand.
French growers have, in other words, woken up to life in the wine-growing Goldilocks Zone, whereas back in ’03 and ’09 they were still needlessly fishing for ripeness. Goldilocks, remember, found Baby Bear’s porridge to be exactly the right temperature; astronomers use the story as a metaphor to describe the habitable zone around stars where planetary water can remain in a liquid state.
Perhaps France can enjoy a decade or two during which great vintages fall repeatedly within its grasp, rather than being the once-in-a-decade rarity they were for most of the 20th century.
There is, though, one way in which our vintage story differs from the fairytale original. The porridge was cooling.
Andrew Jefford is a Decanter contributing editor and multiple award-winning author