In Burgundy, A Powerful 'Machine-Gun Hail Storm' Just Messed Things Up Really Bad
Got a 2010 Burgundy hanging around on your wine rack? Stash it in your cellar and don't drink it for a few years. Not only was it a terrific vintage, it was one of the last before a wave of powerful storms, three years consecutively, hit vineyards in France's most-acclaimed wine region. The latest, just last weekend, destroyed between 30 and 90 percent of the grapes at some vineyards in the Cote de Beaune region; hardest hit were Pommard, Volnay, Mersault, Saint-Aubin and Puligny-Montrachet. The brief, but fierce, deluge of hail, dubbed a "machine-gun hail storm," took a serious toll on Beane's vineyards.
Baptiste Patouillet, who works in a wine shop in Beaune — located a 90-minute drive north of Lyon — reports that winemakers had been particularly counting on this year's harvest to rescue them from the wave of recent poor ones. Unfortunately, it was the reverse.
"Stocks are empty, and the winemakers counted on this year to fill their oak barrels [and] to make a lot of wine," Patouillet says via email. "Some of the [winemakers] have financial problems and that's why this year was important. This becomes a problem for everybody — the wine sellers, the wine shops —because if there isn't wine, you don't need anybody to sell it."
In anticipation of the storm, some winemakers had installed generators to produce warm air and keep their vines from freezing. The head of the Volnay wine growers association, Thiébault Huber, said that the storm would have been even more devastating without those generators. If there is any positive side to all this, it's that we should all appreciate a good Burgundy even more knowing the challenges and risks undertaken by winemakers in the face of unpredictable weather.
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