Harvesting in La Tâche

I left Switzerland at 7:00am – accompanied by thunder and lightening.

It’s 240km to Dijon where the BBC assured me I would find unbroken sunshine, but for the first 200 of those kilometres it rained – sometimes biblically. 40km to go and the rain stopped, 25km to go and we even have traces of blue sky and flashes of sun – amazing! It’s obviously rained overnight in the Côte d’Or and it’s hardly unbroken sunshine either but I’m not complaining.

I started my tour of ‘vine inspection’ in Marsannay, slowly working my way south. Lunch at La Maison Vigneron (Chambolle), after lunch an appointment with a producer before continuing south to my harvest ‘home’ in Beaune.

The grapes in the Côte de Nuits look rather good, there are some shrivelled ones and an occasional bunch with rot, but this cursury inspection implied grapes way better than 2004 and possibly also 2006 – but inspection at the ‘table de trie’ will be the real judge as these are the grapes round the edges of the vineyards – I didn’t go deeper for fear of sinking in the wet red clay!
Eye-witnesses tell me the Côte de Beaune pinot noir is less well blessed – I decided not to check in the rain – Beaune and Savigny will apparently be ‘challenging’.

There is some small evidence of harvesting already done – piles of stems discarded outside cuveries and at the side of vineyards, but it’s clearly the exception so far. This morning I found only three groups of harvesters, the first surprisingly were in La Tâche; I thought at first it was La Grande Rue, but the LGR vineyard is only about 50 metres wide and these harvesters confirmed to me that they were working on the other side of the ‘line’ – you can not a slight colour change on the picture above. This central area of La Tâche is planted to a higher density – I assume this accounts for the difference in ripeness. The harvesting of a parcel of Vosne Les Beaux Monts (at least that’s what it looked like from the road) and also part of Les Petits Vougeots were the only others in full swing.

Whilst in the cellar of my afternoon appointment there was was thunder and heavy rain – it’s still raining now (6pm) about 3 hours later. I’m glad we didn’t start harvesting today.

Forecasters seem to agree that we have about 10 days of clear weather starting tomorrow, we will start with some Beaune 1er Cru, – let’s see how bad it can be.

Tomorrow I’m in the Côtes.

My normal harvest ‘home’ will start with minor appellations on Thursday so I will have plenty of time tomorrow to look around the vineyards and see the plight – or not – of the grapes. I know that some have already started their harvests, while others tell me:

“We will begin the 4th of September, we must wait, it’s not enough ripe everywhere. The weather forecasts are not bad so we take the risk …”

Certainly the weather was poor last week, but this week and next it is set fair (allegedly!) but still rather cool for the time of the year, exemplified by the graph above (which I stole from Météo Savigny-lès-Beaune) that shows you how much colder August has been vs the average!

Updates over the next couple of days.

This year is a ‘revolution’ in Burgundy – there are no ‘bans des vendanges’ – rather it is expected that everyone can be (act) ‘responsible’! The only decree was that the harvesting shouldn’t start before the 13th August, August 1st was initially suggested before reverting to the 13th – revolutions come hard!

Despite the weather maps showing clear for the next days, and in spite of daily weather reports looking almost good, the storms keep coming through. Wednesday (lastnight) had another heavy downpour for much of the Côte d’Or. It seems many still plan to start their harvest during the last days of August, others are scheduling September. Here’s one quote

“As we have a very bad summer (lots of rain), we are going to pick around 3-4 of September, I prefer that to be honest! Rot begins to be important now, it looks like a difficult vintage, but I like that !! 05 was too easy …”

From Berry Bros & Rudd website:

“18, July. It’s all doom and gloom in the press at the moment with reports coming in thick and fast that there might not even be a harvest in Bordeaux or Burgundy. In actual fact, many vineyards are looking healthy and happy with a very early harvest predicted.

This is in part thanks to a beautiful April which prompted early flowering, with the combination of rain and sun successfully managing to prolong the vines growth cycle.

Dominique Lafon reports a little mildew in one vineyard, and localized hail damage has been reported in St Aubin, Beaune and Chablis, but there has been nothing too dramatic thus far and the general outlook is good.

This may in part be due to the recent cold weather which has prevented the mildew damage from spreading further.”

Clearly the weather has been quite sunny for the (almost) two weeks since they posted this piece, with only about 1-2 days with rain in every 10.

Humidity has been quite high, but the fact that it’s not been too hot (only 22-28°C) has provided relief from rot. Clearly, many producers have taken a belts and braces approach, and have been doing as much spraying of copper sulphate solution onto their vines as possible as a safeguard.

We are now around 1 month from harvesting – perhaps less – and we are fast approaching a ‘classic’ vintage in the best (non pejorative) sense of that word. Plenty of sunlight and enough heat for ripening, better still – coupled to cooler nights – I find uniformly hot weather wines very one dimensional, at least in their youth.

Many fingers remain crossed.

There’s an old saying – “it’s August that makes the vintage”. Well, this year not; it was so precocious a start to the year that the normal 100 days from flowering to harvesting points to an August rather than September vendanges. So this year it will be July that to a large extent ‘makes the vintage’.

The forecast for the next days will gladden the heart of all the vignerons. Much of June and July to-date has been a succession of wet, warm, wet, sun then wet again – the main punctuation in the weather has been the thunder and hail. Unfortunately this means not enough sun to chase away the damp so rot is a problem. In some regions even hardened biodynamic types have had to become pragmatic and use chemical approaches to save any crop.

Anyway, provided we can get an extended dry period – and this wind will also help – all is most certainly not lost. Even a couple of weeks more and it would be a sad vendanges, but today there is still hope…