“We had Christmas on the balcony, we are going to have Easter on the embers”: wine and agricultural France went into combat mode on Sunday in the face of the spring frost which threatens the buds and therefore the future harvests, after a difficult first night, especially in the southwest.
In Bergerac (Dordogne), where the thermometer fell to -5.1 degrees overnight from Saturday to Sunday, a record for the month of April, Eric Chadourne, winegrower and president of the Bergerac and Duras wine interprofession was struck by the duration of the frost: “three or four hours” between -3 and -5 degrees overnight from Saturday to Sunday.
“There will be breakage”, predicts this winegrower who started his wind turbine at 10.30 p.m. on Saturday to stir the air around his vines, and thus try to prevent the frost from destroying the young shoots that have just appeared.
“The Garonne valley was particularly affected overnight from Saturday to Sunday and we recorded many falling temperature records,” confirms Tristan Amm, forecaster at Météo-France.
On average, in France, the temperatures on Sunday were 6 degrees below the average for the season, according to Météo-France. A wave of polar air from Scandinavia which mainly affects a cold diagonal from the northeast of the country to the southwest, will favor night frosts, especially when the sky is clear on Monday and Tuesday, indicates Météo-France.
During the night from Saturday to Sunday, the thermometer fell to 0.3 degrees in Toulon, a Mediterranean city where the previous cold record for this period dated from 1958 (+1.1 degrees). In Brest, it fell to -2.4 degrees, against -2.3 degrees in 1978, according to Météo-France.
The organization again predicts “severe frosts” at night from Sunday to Monday, on the same diagonal, from Alsace to the Pyrenees via the Center-East and the Massif Central. “In the Nevers region, temperatures can drop to -7 degrees,” said Mr. Amm.
It also warns of the risk of ice on the roads in the same regions.
The RTE electricity network manager also predicted a tense situation on Monday morning, for the same reason, by calling on companies and individuals to curb their electricity consumption, especially between 7:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m., in particular for household appliances.
– “We have to watch all night” –
On the agricultural side, in the Tarn-et-Garonne, Pierre Bonnet, arborist from the north of the department spent a sleepless night on Saturday with temperatures dropping to -4 degrees on his land. “The difference with last year is that this temperature is the same in the lowlands of the fields as on the hillsides,” he told AFP, fearing for the early varieties of plums.
In the same department, Béatrice Lamanerie, an arborist in Lizac, launched sprinkling on her trees at midnight, a technique “based on watering”: The fruits gain an envelope of ice which protects them.
Still in the South-West, the Saint-Emilion vineyard was also affected, “but there will not be the same damage” as last year, the vines being less advanced than last year, hopes Jean- François Galhaud, president of the Saint-Emilion wine council.
Same hope in Chablis, where Stéphane Aufrère, based in Fleys, hopes that the buds, a little later than last year, will resist the cold. He has already spent last night “warming up” what he can and “preparing for the coming night”.
“We heat two hectares out of twenty” using large candles distributed between the rows of vines to prevent the cold from seizing the plants. “We have neither the means nor the staff to protect all our vines,” he told AFP.
In the Rhone Valley too we are preparing.
“There hasn’t been too much damage so far but they are announcing more cold weather for the nights to come, it looks complicated until Wednesday”, notes Elodie Merlin, who operates 3 ha of apricot trees in Bourg-les-Valence (Drôme).
The frost has already caused him to lose the harvest of three varieties in recent weeks. Her husband sleeps there to watch over the orchards: “You have to watch all night, the alarms ring all the time…”.
im-cor-fby-bpe-ppy / ak / tes