Hail, Frost and Spreading the Risk

Warming is not simply warmth. What it has actually delivered to Burgundy is volatility, and the last fifteen years have been an education in what that costs.

Hail took large parts of three consecutive crops in 2012, 2013 and 2014, with Volnay and Pommard particularly badly hit. One lost crop is survivable for a domaine with stock in the cellar. Three in a row is not, because the reserves that carried you through the first are gone by the third. It is the event that changed how the Côte thinks about risk, and conversations about buying fruit sound different after 2014 than they did before.

Then frost took much of the 2016 and 2021 crops, by a mechanism that is counter-intuitive enough to state plainly. The vine tracks accumulated warmth, so a mild late winter pushes budbreak earlier. A cold snap that would have been harmless in March against dormant wood destroys soft green shoots in April. Warming has not removed the frost. It has moved the vine into its path.

The defences against both are partial and everybody involved knows it. Against frost: candles and braziers between the rows, wind machines to break the inversion, spraying water so that the latent heat released as it freezes protects the bud. All are effective against a shallow inversion of a degree or two and essentially useless below about minus four, which is precisely when the damage happens. All are expensive, all require somebody awake at four in the morning, and candles produce a great deal of smoke. Growers use them because the alternative is doing nothing.

Against hail: netting, which works and changes the microclimate, and is restricted or banned in some appellations on the grounds that it alters the conditions the classification assumes. And cloud seeding with silver iodide from ground generators, used across the region, with genuinely disputed effectiveness. You cannot observe the storm that did not happen, which makes the evidence very hard to assess and the arguments correspondingly heated. Neither is a solution. Both are attempts to shave the tail of a distribution.

Which leaves the defence that nobody designed. Hail falls in strips a few hundred metres wide, so a domaine with two hectares in one commune can lose everything to a storm that misses its neighbour entirely, while one with the same area spread across six communes cannot. The fragmentation produced by two centuries of inheritance law, which every account of Burgundy describes as a problem, turns out in a volatile climate to be crop insurance. It is an accident that has become a survival strategy.

This is also the strongest practical argument for the négociant arrangement that purists dislike. Buying fruit from growers in communes the storm missed is how a small domaine with no reserves survives to farm its own vines next year. In a stable climate the objection, that it separates the maker from the ground, has real force. After three lost harvests it looks different, and a great many respected domaines now do both and say so on the label.

The number that has changed is the planning assumption. Growers used to expect one bad year in ten, which a careful business can absorb. Several now say they plan for three in ten. That is not a different climate in the abstract; it is a different business, and it is reshaping who can afford to own vineyard on the Côte.