2019 Growing Season (France/Italy)

I realize we are only late July, but is there any sense for how 2019 is shaping up? I was just recalling frost in Burgundy, lighting fires in Piedmont in May… and the recent Parisian heat wave. Is this par for the course or is there concern for 2019?

Season still going strong as it’s not over till it’s over. A bit premature with the question.

Are such frost and heatwave are par for the course, or was it in actuality meaningful and there is enough time/weather left to recover?

In general wrt both frost and heatwaves it depends on time of year, duration, and temperature extremes.

With frost, it is common to kill off primary buds but the plant will push secondary buds. Impact later and smaller crop. The later or more sever the frost, the more sever the impact. So impact to wine can range from almost insignificant to loss of crop for a year.

Heatwave is even harder to characterize so I won’t even try.

None of the above is specific to anything that has happened this year as I really don’t know the details and am not qualified to even make a guess. So much of the growing season is about the last month. A great year can be ruined with late season weather just like a bad year can be saved with perfect weather.

I have a feeling of earlier frosts being tied to rising global temperatures. In the vineyards and fruitbelts of New York State, there is the increasing problem of an early flowering being followed by a killing frost. I feel like Europe has been having more extreme events like these also.

What I find interesting about Burgundy/Bordeaux vs Sonoma/Napa is that France will get some rain during the growing season and CA does not .

And 100 degrees in Burgundy ? Can’t be good I assume.

Anecdotally the 2019 growing season looks suboptimal, at least to my palate. There’s already been one heat wave in June that broke all sorts of records. Yesterday in Bordeaux it was 41.2C (106.1F) which broke the record set in 2003. And we’re not even into August when historically most late summer heat waves arrive.

Here’s a map from the BBC indicating temperature ranges forecast for 25 July.

Here’s hoping the heat wave won’t be as bad as forecast.