September Food and Wine in Provence
Diary of Giles MacDonough
It has been a crazy summer. After a scorching June in Britain, we had a cold July and August which picked up a bit at the end. The heat reappeared in September, climbing up again to a dizzy 35C in London. It is rare to see proper summer weather in September here but there was lots of record-breaking warmth this year, and it is not over yet. I am writing on 3 October and the BBC is telling me to expect sun well into next week, with the thermometer meant to touch 26C on Sunday.
Every now and then I go outside to look at that apology for a vine at the back of my house which climbs a forty-foot bay tree and gives me a few bunches of dull, sour grapes every autumn. I generally leave them hanging for the starlings. If the birds spare me a small portion, I make a thin wine which I then turn into vinegar. They do not generally ripen well. This year they flowered during the hot dry spell in June and many of them are now blue-black. They still have no redeeming flavour, but maybe next Wednesday I will make a few bottles of vinegar before the weather is set to break on the 11th.
Good news for Britain maybe, with proper levels of ripeness for the nobler grapes like Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, rather than making do with Bacchus or Madeleine Angevine-based wines for a change; but 2023 has not necessarily been great for wines in Mainland Europe, where heat waves have been tempered by floods (heat and rain brings rot) and drought conditions the rest of the time have meant low yields and unequal ripening. The general conclusion is: despite such good weather at the end of the growing season, only the best winemakers will make good wines, that is those who made a stringent selection prior to fermenting their grapes.
