I didn’t expect – or rather hope – to be making this short addendum but such is the life of farmers.

Storms were forecast – violent too – but it came to pass that there were a lot of hailstones – and images of golf-ball-sized hailstones too coming from across the Côtes d’Or and Chalonnais yesterday evening. For now, it’s dry and cloudy.

I’ve seen pictures of damaged grapes but no pictures of stripped vines – the growers that I’ve spoken to indicate patchy damage – 0-20% – perhaps and more generally 5-10% in the southern Côte de Nuits – Gevrey seems to have, largely, escaped.

As usual in such cases, I’ll wait some days for sombre reflection so that the emotions have chance to cool and become more objective. At this stage, it looks like it could have been much worse in the Côte d’Or and fortunately for Chablis, they had no hail. I’m still waiting for feedback from the south of Burgundy…