France is expecting its poorest wine grape harvest since 1945 after an unusually mild March and a frosty April, experts have said, although the hot summer promises to deliver excellent quality, reports The Guardian.
“At harvests everywhere, in places where we thought there would be a little less, there’s a lot less,” Jérôme Despey, head of a governmental wine advisory board, said on Friday. This year’s harvest will be the smallest since 1945, he told a news conference.
The French agriculture ministry said output was expected to total 37.2m hectolitres – 18% less than 2016 and 17% below the average over the past five years. The 2016 harvest was one of the poorest in 30 years.
Despey said the ministry figures were based on assessments made in early August, before the start of the harvests, which have now begun in the south-east about two weeks earlier than usual.
Despey, who is also secretary general of France’s biggest farmers’ union, the FNSEA, said last week he expected a 40% drop in output in the prime wine-growing region of Bordeaux, the country’s largest. Vineyards in north-eastern Alsace, which produces mainly white wines, were also hit hard.
This year’s drop in production is “mainly attributable to the severe spring frost that affected all the wine-growing regions to varying degrees at a sensitive time for the vine”, the agriculture ministry said.