We received an email from Philippe Bernard the other day, one of our favourite wine producers, in Fixin in Côte de Nuits. He was very busy, not only in the vineyards but also in the cellar where the reds 2014 are doing their malolactic fermentation at the moment. And it looks very promising, he says.
But you can more or less leave the wines tranquil in the cellar to do their thing. This is not the case in the vineyard. Here speed and intervention are the key words. Managing the canopy, spraying to avoid diseases…
The vines look fine, Philippe says, they grow quickly, maybe even too quickly. For Philippe, and probably also for his neighbours, the problem this year seems to be oidium (a fungus attack). “It doesn’t really matter how well educated you are or how well informed you are”, he says. “It is really the weather that decides and each year gives us ‘surprises’ in the form of oidium, mildiou, botrytis… We must remain humble.”
Wine producers are farmers and they never know what Mother Nature has in store for them. But we keep our fingers crossed for a great vintage 2015 in Burgundy and elsewhere.
And just as the wine producers who must remain humble towards what nature gives them, so we wine consumers need to be humble towards the wonder that we receive in the bottle. It is not always simply a question of a beverage in a bottle with a more or less famous name on the label.
Britt & Per
PS: Recommend to your friends to read the Brief!
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