2013

The 2013 harvest was a disaster by any serious measure. Cold spring, late flowering, rain in August, rain in September, more rain when we could least afford it. I picked early because I had no choice and watched neighbours who waited lose more than I did, which is the particular comfort of being less wrong than the person beside you.

The wine itself is thin. I know this. It does not improve with age in the way the good years do. I have about four hundred bottles left and I have stopped worrying about them.

What I remember from that season is my younger daughter Camille spending three weeks helping at the harvest, the first time she'd worked it properly since she was a teenager. She's a lawyer in Bordeaux now, which I have made my peace with. She picked in the rain without complaining and drank the vin de table at the end of each day with the same face she makes when she drinks the good stuff, which either means she has no palate or she was being generous. I choose to believe the second.

The 2013 is not a wine I would serve a stranger. But I open a bottle sometimes in the evening and it tastes like the rain and like those three weeks, which is enough.

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