At this week's Europêch' European stonefruit foreasts, delivered at the annual Medfel exhibition in the southern French town of Perpignan, attendees received a sobering prognosis for the forthcoming season.
In a near repeat of last year's climatic disturbances, early production zones were again hit by frost at the end of February. This was followed by a second cold wave in mid-March, especially in parts of the southeast of France.
The majority of Europe's production zones experienced prolonged winter conditions, with temperatures remaining abnormally low and with rainfall both frequent and abundant.
As a result, experts have predicted a delay in this season's harvest of up to two weeks, severely hampering attempts to anticipate likely stonefruit volumes.
Compared with 2012, Italy anticipates a drop of 2 per cent for both peaches and nectarines, to 648,000 and 850,600 tonnes respectively.
For France the decrease is expected to be more pronounced, with peaches forecast to fall by 7 per cent to 128,066 tonnes and nectarines dropping by 6 per cent to 128,495 tonnes.
Following last year's bumper harvest, Greek peaches are predicted to fall by 2 per cent to 225,000 tonnes, still 3 per cent up on the five-year average.
The one exception was Spain, where peach volumes are anticipated to rise by 17 per cent, and flat peaches by the same percentage, to 307,455 and 132,523 tonnes respectively.
Spanish nectarines are expected to see an even greater increase, forecast at 23 per cent to 516,148 tonnes.
In summary, European peaches and nectarines are forecast to rise by 3 per cent and 4 per cent compared with last season, to 1.44m and 1.57m tonnes respectively.
As for apricots, delays of up to a fortnight are also anticipated throughout Europe's growing regions, with total volumes expected to fall by 17 per cent to just under 500,000 tonnes.
According to Europêch' facilitator and chair Eric Hostalnou, the delayed start to the season means revisions may be significant when updated figures are released in mid-June.
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