In the memory of a winegrower, the harvest has never started so early in Beaujolais. The ban was set on Wednesday August 17, calculated according to the ripening of the grapes. Directly caused by climate change, this earliness record is causing concern in this region rich in ten crus and twelve appellations, located north of Lyon, between the Rhône valley and Burgundy. The Beaujolais vineyard has nearly 17,000 hectares of planted vines, and produces around one million hectoliters per harvest.
“We have never experienced a drought of such intensity, more precisely of such duration. The lack of water started from the month of March. In 2019, we experienced a drought that was limited to the summer, testifies Jean-Pierre Rivière, 58, showing the clusters with reduced grains, sometimes completely dehydrated, which look like currants. This year is since spring. The foliage is struggling. The vine suffers. The grape did not develop completely. »
Walking through the winegrower’s plots, located around Bagnols (Rhône), south of Beaujolais, the effects of the drought are immediately apparent. In some areas, the leaves of the vine have scorched. They snap like twigs. The youngest plans are the most fragile: the vines are less thick, the roots shallower, and therefore more sensitive to lack of water.
All it takes is a slight change in soil to see the difference in foliage volume on the same line of vines. In the clay-limestone sectors of Beaujolais, the vines are greener, favored by the retention of humidity in the soil. On the granitic soils, widespread in the north, the situation is more difficult.
The banns recede inexorably
Coming from a family of winegrowers for three generations, Jean-Pierre Rivière remembers being shocked by the great heat wave of 2003, which hit the whole of France with full force. That year, the harvest ban was set for August 8th. Never seen. Born in 1922, his father told him then: “It reminds me of the 1947 drought.” Jean-Pierre Rivière had deduced that the phenomenon could occur once or twice a century. However, the episodes of heat multiply and seem to accelerate for twelve years. The date of the harvest ban has been set ten times in August over the past twenty years.
“In forty years, we have advanced the date of the harvest by three weeks on average”, says the winemaker, who is also president of Sicarex Beaujolais, an experimental research cooperative. The interprofessional organization and the Rhône Chamber of Agriculture regularly record the indicators of the development of the vine. The data confirms the winegrowers’ intuition.
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