Fiona’s Blog

I want to take you back to the end of August. We were nervous. Talk around us was that yet again, harvesting in Bordeaux was beginning at the earliest dates ever recorded. We walked around our vineyards nervously checking the state of the vine leaves; noticing the cracks in the parched soil; consulting again and again all the different weather apps we had on our telephones. Absolutely not necessary to check our rain monitors; they had been dry for months.

My most recent visit to Burgundy took place during the week of the annual Hospices de Beaune auction, although I got out of town before the gavel went down.  All week, there had been a frenzied excitement brewing in the bourgeois streets of Beaune; press and trade were whispering under their breaths that prices would be astronomical; that this year it would be the négociants not the producers who would be buying the Hospices barrels and that the results of the sale would affect the future of Burgundy wines for the next few years...

2020 will always be known as the third year in a great trilogy of vintages 2018-2019-2020 in Bordeaux. Yet the story behind the 2020s is much more interesting than just wonderful quality...

This is a land of rolling hills; of morning fogs (Nebbiolo takes its name from “Nebbia” the Italian word for fog); of contrasting climates from the icy winds of the snow-capped Alps to the warm influence from the Mediterranean Sea. The soils are rich clay at the bases and limestone on the summits of the hills...

Climate change has affected all areas of agriculture and we notice this especially in viticulture with its attention to detail and its concentration of small parcels of vines in comparison to large prairies of wheat. Throughout the world winemakers have had to battle over the last few years with increased alcohol levels, sunburnt grapes, premature withering of vine leaves and a host of dramatic weather patterns from late frosts, hailstorms and summer droughts brought on by global warming.

We are just finishing running off the wines into oak barrels and sending the pomace off to the distillery to make hand sanitizer in these Covid times. It is only now, when things are slowing down, that we have time to take stock of this extra-ordinary vintage...