Highs and lows: Champagne’s 2026 harvest
Published: 09 October, 2026
“My grandfather lived until 90 and passed away in 2003 and never experienced an August harvest. But this is the sixth August harvest in the last decade,” Gilles Dumangin of Champagne Dumangin told me as I witnessed first hand the earliest harvest on record. This had been an extraordinary year. 2026 had started with a warm winter that triggered early budburst, followed by spring frost, severe summer drought and five heatwaves. And, as Champagne Ayala’s cellar master Julian Gout put it, climate change sceptics should “come and see for themselves”.
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