Vintage 2012 will go down in history as quite extraordinary for all the wrong reasons. And, for the first time in half a century, the world may have a shortage rather than a surplus of wine.

Europe’s growing season has been horrible – unlike the west coast of America. Late January and early February, when many vignerons were in the vineyards pruning before the arrival of spring, came that viciously cold snap all over Europe. Temperatures were almost low enough to kill vines – most unusual in supposedly Mediterranean climates. Spring arrived tentatively, but without usefully plentiful rains to replenish water tables. And then, disastrously for quantity, there was extremely unsettled weather in June for the all-important flowering. The result was an exceptionally small, uneven fruit set and relatively few bunches.

Since considerable work in the vineyards on quality-conscious estates nowadays consists of snipping off surplus bunches in order to make the final crop more concentrated, you would think this could be a good thing. But the problem was that the uneven setting of the fruit resulted in berries of very different sizes on the same bunch that ripened at inconveniently differing rates, making it difficult to decide when to pick.