How widespread is the bad 2002 harvest

Nils Gustaf Lindgren

True. The terrible storms hit SOME wineries and areas, but certainly not all, and unless you got flooded chacnes are that you turned out some very good wine.

More fundamentally, I would be very suspicious of this atbreastude towards vintages, whereby as soon as one is labelled "bad" it is buttumed that a) it hit everybody in a large area in the same way b) wines from a lesser vintage are not worth consideration.

Lesser vintages can be stupendously fresh. In appellations that are known for longevity, you will be disappointed by the lack of cellar-worthiness, but the wines, often made in smaller quanbreasty after a more rigorous selection than usual, can be amazingly fresh and stand out as excellent wines for ready consumption. A good winemaker will not make bad wine in bad years.

The opposite phenomenon also exists: when a vintage is considered great, it is buttumed that any monkey in that fortunate area will make a great wine. The good stuff is still a very small percentage, even in fantastic vintage years... Also beware that isolated storms can drop devastating hail on a single vineyard, and the resulting wine, even in a good vintage year and from a reputable producer, may be crap.

So the moral is, vintage information is only a very general and almost meaningless concept, unless you taste the stuff and go around and talk to the winemakers (or read about it on AFW), there can be no reliable decisions based on vintage.

-- Mike Tommasi - Six Fours, France