Bordeaux Today

Bordeaux Today: Too Much Wine, Fewer Drinkers, a Warmer World

Overproduction, subsidized uprooting, climate stress and new grapes: Bordeaux's 2020s crisis in verified numbers and historical perspective.

Between August 2023 and May 2026, about 21,000 hectares of Bordeaux vineyard were pulled out, according to the regional statistics service of the French agriculture ministry (DRAAF Nouvelle-Aquitaine). That is roughly a fifth of the vineyard as it stood at the start of the decade. Most of those vines were healthy. They went because their wine no longer sold for what it cost to make, and much of the removal was paid for with public money: the state and the wine trade's own interprofession pay growers to take vines out permanently. No contraction in the region's modern history comes close.

Three separate trends meet here. French wine drinking has been falling for ninety years. The export market Bordeaux built in the 2010s, China, has shrunk by half. And the climate the vineyard was planted for is changing.

The customer who stopped drinking

The underlying cause is neither a bad harvest nor a bad decade. It is the decline of the French wine drinker.

In 1934 the average French person drank 170 litres of wine a year. In 2023 the figure was 45 litres, in the long-run series compiled by Kym Anderson and Vicente Pinilla at the University of Adelaide. Nearly three quarters of the domestic market has gone in three generations, as wine moved from something drunk with every meal to something chosen for an occasion; The Economics of Bordeaux Wine in Charts follows that shift decade by decade.

The fall is steepest in the category where Bordeaux is strongest, everyday red. Younger French consumers drink less wine than their parents did, drink it less often, and choose red less often when they do. Gironde production has moved only slowly in response. Red wine was about 90 per cent of the department's volume a decade ago and 83 per cent in 2025, by the DRAAF's count. The region is still overwhelmingly red, and its home market keeps asking for less red.

Selling below cost

At the generic end of the market, the numbers stopped adding up in the early 2020s. Bulk Bordeaux is traded by the tonneau of 900 litres, and the interprofessional council, the CIVB, publishes the prevailing prices. In spring 2024 generic red Bordeaux sold for an average of 946 euros per tonneau. Over the 2025–26 campaign (August 2025 to June 2026), the CIVB average for conventional red was 880 euros: under one euro a litre, for wine carrying the best-known appellation name in the world. Cost analyses published by the trade paper Vitisphere have repeatedly put these prices below the cost of production, so a significant share of growers lose money on each vintage they sell in bulk.

Exports were meant to absorb the surplus. Instead they shrank. In 2017, according to CIVB figures, China took 20 per cent of Bordeaux's exports, around 80 million bottles a year at the peak, which made it the region's largest export market. By 2025 shipments had halved, to roughly 40 million bottles, after China's economic slowdown and a change in how its consumers drink. Estates that had planted and priced for Chinese demand were left, in a few years, with the wine and no buyer.

Paying growers to uproot

French wine crises have usually ended in organized retreat, and this one is following the pattern. In April 2023 the CIVB's general assembly voted a 57-million-euro plan to uproot up to 9,500 hectares in the Gironde at 6,000 euros per hectare. The state put in 38 million and the interprofession 19 million. Officially it was a sanitary measure: abandoned vines spread flavescence dorée, a vine disease, and the plan was framed as containing it.

In October 2024 the government added a national scheme at 4,000 euros per hectare, with a budget of 120 million euros. When applications closed that November, FranceAgriMer had received 5,418 applications covering 27,461 hectares across France. Roughly a quarter of the applicants said they were leaving wine production altogether.

The DRAAF's 2026 statistical portrait gives the Gironde totals. By May 2026, 12,284 hectares had been removed under the aided schemes and an estimated 8,700 hectares without aid, which makes about 21,000 hectares in under three years. The department's productive vineyard stood at 91,543 hectares in 2025. That was 9,200 hectares less than a year earlier and 27,000 hectares (−23 per cent) less than in 2010, and around 8,000 more hectares are expected to go in 2026–27. The number of farms has fallen too: about 3,000 wine-growing holdings in 2024, 18 per cent fewer than in 2019.

Nothing on this scale has happened in Bordeaux since phylloxera. Paid uprooting itself is not new, though. The long-run data show it as a recurring French policy tool, not something Bordeaux invented.

Warming and a run of hard vintages

A slower change runs underneath the market crisis. Average temperatures in Bordeaux have risen by about 2 °C since 1950, according to Météo-France data reported by Undark in 2018. Across France, harvests now start about two weeks earlier than the historical norm. In a 2016 paper in Nature Climate Change, Benjamin Cook and Elizabeth Wolkovich used French harvest records going back to 1600 to separate the effects of heat and drought. Early harvests used to come in drought years. Since the 1980s, they found, warming on its own has been enough to bring harvests forward.

Riper grapes make stronger wine. A generation ago red Bordeaux commonly reached 12 to 13.5 per cent alcohol; 14 to 14.5 per cent is now routine, as the Washington Post reported in 2020. The style is moving away from the freshness that buyers increasingly ask for.

The 2020s have also brought a series of difficult vintages. According to the annual weather and crop reports Gavin Quinney writes for JancisRobinson.com, 2021 brought severe spring frost and mildew, 2022 was the hottest and driest season in recent memory, and 2023 had the worst mildew pressure in twenty-five years. In 2024, frost and mildew on a smaller vineyard produced only 3.3 million hectolitres, according to the CIVB. That was 14 per cent down on 2023 and Bordeaux's smallest harvest since 1991. The 2025 harvest, from an even smaller vineyard, came to 3.2 million.

Overproduction and short harvests look like opposite problems. Bordeaux has both at once, because demand has fallen faster than supply.

New grapes, whiter wines

Growers and regulators are adapting in two ways. The first is the grape list. In January 2021 the INAO, the French appellation authority, approved six new varieties for the Bordeaux and Bordeaux Supérieur appellations. They were chosen from 52 candidates tested over ten years for drought resistance and later ripening. The reds are Arinarnoa, Castets, Marselan and Touriga Nacional, the last of them borrowed from the Douro; the whites are Alvarinho and Liliorila. The limits are tight: at most 5 per cent of an estate's planted area and 10 per cent of any blend. Even so, the list of permitted varieties had barely changed in a century, and earlier changes to it are covered in A History of Bordeaux's Grape Varieties.

The chart shows why the grape list matters. In 2022 Merlot alone covered 58 per cent of the Gironde's vines. It ripens earliest of the region's main red grapes, so further warming hits it first.

The second change is colour. Generic red is struggling; Crémant de Bordeaux, the region's traditional-method sparkling wine, grew 57 per cent in volume in 2022 alone, to 91,000 hectolitres from 1,345 hectares, and its volume has risen fivefold in ten years. Dry whites are holding up better than reds, and some growers are replanting red parcels for white and sparkling wine. The scale is small, however. Crémant is still about one per cent of Bordeaux's volume. It helps the growers who make it; it cannot absorb a region's surplus.

Earlier contractions

Bordeaux has shrunk and rebuilt before. In the 1880s phylloxera and the mildews killed vines down to the roots, and French production fell by more than two thirds. The region replanted on grafted vines. In the seventeenth century it changed the wines it made to suit Dutch buyers. In the twentieth, as the home market shrank, it turned to export.

None of those recoveries was automatic, and none came from terroir alone. In each case the region found new customers and changed what it grew to suit them. The uprooting under way now fits that pattern: a vineyard reducing itself to the size of the market that actually exists. What is different this time is that the climate is moving as well, so the hectares that remain are being replanted for warmer summers. On the evidence so far that means more white wine, fresher styles, and some grapes no eighteenth-century Bordeaux broker would have recognized.