These are always anxious weeks in the Bordeaux vineyards, where 15% of France’s wine is grown, including in celebrated places like Chateau Latour and Chateau Mouton-Rothschild. In earlier years, this ritual anxiety among the region’s winegrowers had a pleasingly folkloric quality. In the middle of August, the grapes would ripen and their colour start to turn. About 45 days from now, tradition dictates, it will be time to start picking the 2025 vintage. As the wine writer Edmund Penning-Rowsell put it: “To pick or not to pick is the most momentous decision in the winemaking year in Bordeaux.”
This once timeless rhythm is now collapsing. Part of the problem is the climate crisis. Bordeaux still benefits from its moderate Atlantic climate. But south-west France is getting much hotter and drier. Even in the Gironde region, maximum temperatures have been close to 40C at times this past week. Adaptation, in the form of hardier grapes and greater crop diversity, feels unavoidable.
A much larger challenge, however, is today’s changing wine market. Demand for red wine in general, and for the full-bodied, long maturing red wines with generally high alcohol content that are synonymous with Bordeaux in particular, has slumped. This has affected not just the signature premiers crus in which monarchs and the global rich have always invested, but also the vineyards producing the ordinary Bordeaux red wines sold in supermarkets around the globe. For a region whose wine output is 85% red, this is an existential crisis.
Bordeaux produces around 650m bottles of wine each year; but it currently sells only 500m. Demand for red wine in France has fallen by 38% in the past five years; in the 10 years to 2023 the fall was 45%. Nor is the slump confined to France. Demand in the Chinese market has halved since 2017. US tariffs will undoubtedly hit the 20% of Bordeaux exports that previously went across the Atlantic. These consumption changes are likely to be irreversible, at least in the short and medium term.
A popular response for many would be to slash prices. Global Bordeaux prices soared outrageously in the Chinese boom years. But with consumers turning away in droves, and too many producers operating at a loss, price cuts have not reshaped the market. With aid from the French government and the EU, about 15% of Bordeaux vineyards have instead been dug up and put to new uses, including olives and kiwifruit, since 2019.
In the nick of time, there is now a more traditional but also genuinely radical idea – to produce lighter and less tannic wines. History is on this idea’s side. Bordeaux reds have been known for centuries in Britain as claret. But this much debated word dates from when England’s Henry II and his descendants ruled in medieval Aquitaine. Back then, the reds of Bordeaux were often lighter, fresher wines known as clairet, somewhere between a modern red and a rosé, to be drunk young, which for the English meant soon after they arrived from their voyage from France.
Small amounts of clairet are still produced in parts of the Bordeaux region even now. Today there are moves to expand production with the aim of winning new consumers who have rejected heavier reds. Clairet’s advocates say it should be drunk within a couple of years and should be drunk chilled. Traditional claret drinkers will upend their decanters in disgust. But clairet sounds just the thing to accompany a barbecue over a warm summer weekend.