Chablis: Climate

Climate has always played an important role in determining the success and quality of Chablis. Essentially the climate is semi-continental, with no maritime influence, so that the winters are long and hard and the summers often, but not always, fairly hot. There is all the climatic uncertainty, and therefore vintage variation, both in quality and quantity, of a vineyard far from the equator.

One of the key factors in determining how much wine will be produced is the possibility of spring frosts, which can cause enormous damage to the young vine shoots. Depending on how advanced the vegetation is, the vineyards are vulnerable from the end of March until well into May. Since the end of the 1950s, after a decade of vintages particularly badly affected by frost, various methods of protection evolved. Heaters, or smudge pots, may be lit in the vineyards; they are expensive but efficient. The alternative technique of using sprinklers, or aspersion, to spray the vines with water from the moment the temperature drops to freezing point has also been increasingly practised. Wind can seriously prejudice the effectiveness of aspersion, however. In the often parcellated vineyards of Chablis it can be all too easy to protect a neighbour’s vines rather than one’s own. Spraying must continue all the time the temperature is at 0 °C/32 °F or below. Electric cables, cleaner than smudge pots, may also be laid to raise ambient temperatures while taking advantage of France’s reduced night tariffs. Such measures can be sufficiently effective to make the difference in some years between a crop of reasonable quantity and virtually no crop at all. It is now perfectly possible to make a viable living from vines in Chablis, whereas in the 1950s, growers needed both eternal optimism and another crop, so that polyculture was common.