The Harvest

The harvest is now almost to an end and it is bubbling in almost every cellar. How will the vintage 2006 be? Well, the wine producers seem in general quite happy with the result. It will be a good, but perhaps not an exceptional vintage. The summer got off to a very good start with flowering in June without any problems and a (small) heat wave in July. But then arrived August with cold and sometimes wet weather which, of course, is not ideal. September was much better and recovered a bit of the fall-down in August so things turned out pretty well in the end even if some places have had too much rain close to, or during, the harvest. There were some areas in Bordeaux, for example, that had 100 mm of rain in September. So this is a year when the sorting table will pay for its price to remove some rotten grapes.