A New Year perspective

LOOKING forward to the New Year, what can wine lovers realistically look forward to? The hope that it will not hail again in 2015? Our poor friends in Burgundy had plenty to be gloomy about. It hailed for the FOURTH year in succession in 2014. Without pressing the point, when you have three years' hail-impacted and diminished productions in your cellar waiting to be sold, your bankers have been phoning up about your overdrafts, and then in June 2014 you get hail again?

Small wonder that when Dominique Lafon was asked about the hail and his vineyards, his short and succinct reply was, "I don't want to talk about it!" I asked a well-known producer in Germany about their 2014 harvest, and she told me more or less the same thing. A reduced crop too. No Kabinett wines in 2013. "Please look at the Kabinetts in the older vintages!" she said.

But that said, let's look at the bright side of things (and there are some!) we can look forward to in 2015.