Limited quantity but real elegance
The many twists and turns of 2012 made our task very hard until the very end!
It all started with a cold winter, with temperatures so low that some vines died of frost, notably in the Vienne valley.
Then we suffered a spring frost on April 17th, with severe damage in about 10 hectares of our most exposed plots. From then on, we knew the crop would be small.
Next, hail hit our vines of Chinon at the end of May, and destroyed 50% of our future crop on 3.5 hectares.
What we didn’t know yet was that it would rain incessantly from May until the end of July! Mildrew was hard to contain and we had to apply protective treatments at 3 times the usual pace.
Weather was bad during blooming, as it was throughout the month of June. So we knew that yields would be 30% to 50% lower than normal from plot to plot.
There was a stretch of dry, sunny weather before tropical storm Nadine hit many French regions with huge amounts of rain. We started our harvest on October 10th, after waiting for real ripeness in our grapes, and then we had to pick at high speed before rot set.
Despite some dilution, our wines in 2012 are tasty, less concentrated than in 2009, 2010 and 2011, but with good fruit and balance.
This result is quite a miracle: the growing season had been so difficult that we never hoped to make such pleasing wines.
Our major disappointment lays in quantity, 40% less than in a normal year.