Wildfires, smoke and drought threaten French wine industry amid declining global demand

As wildfires razed swaths of Western Europe this summer, wineries in the region have grown increasingly concerned about the fate of one of the area’s most important exports.

In France, Europe’s largest wine exporter by far, some 739,000 hectares (1.8 million acres) of land is dedicated to vineyards that sprawl across wine-making regions such as Languedoc, Bordeaux and the Rhone Valley. So has it been for centuries.

But now, human-induced climate change is causing more extreme weather conditions, threatening the precious and fragile grapes, which are particularly sensitive to heat. Worse, the frequency of wildfires in the tinder-dry forests is rising, causing havoc to agriculture.

This year, Western Europe endured one of its hottest summers, aggravated by the El Nino weather phenomenon, which is characterised by hotter, drier conditions. Europe is now the planet’s fastest-warming continent, and in some places, is ill-equipped to deal with hot weather.

This year’s hot season began with a suffocating heat dome in May, and by mid-August, punishing temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in some areas. Wildfires tore through areas of Gironde, southwestern France, close to Bordeaux and in the heart of wine country.

Higher temperatures force grapes to ripen much faster than normal. While that produces a more sugary flavour, it also affects the grape’s natural acidity and pushes up alcohol content in the wine it produces.

With forests tinder-dry, destructive wildfires have also broken out at a scale never recorded before, including in wine country.

Here’s what we know:

Where have wildfires occurred in France?

The 2026 wildfire season in southwest Europe has been one of the worst in decades, with a series of huge blazes recorded in France between June and July.

At least 465,000 hectares (115,000 acres) of land have been burned since the start of the year, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez told reporters amid the inferno in July.

In the southwest Gironde region alone, an area about four times the size of Paris was burned in the largest fire there since 1949. The department’s capital is Bordeaux, one of the country’s most important wine-growing regions and home to many iconic French wines.

Authorities launched a massive evacuation effort, with some 220,000 people needing to leave their homes, including those living close to Bordeaux, as the blazes engulfed the Gironde’s vast pine forests. The fires were so intense that they created lightning bolts and ignited even more flames.

Southwestern Landes, Var, as well as areas in the Aude and Herault regions have also been affected.

By September 1, some small fires were still active in the south, including in Saumos, about an hour from Bordeaux, according to the monitoring website Feux de forets. All of the blazes are now under control.

How are grape vines affected by fires?

Although the fires reached within 15 kilometres (9 miles) of Bordeaux, most of the region’s vineyards, which are located further inland, have been largely untouched, Per Karlsson, a wine expert who runs a wine tour agency, BK Wine Tours, alongside his wife, told Al Jazeera.

However, some growers are at risk not from the fires, but from the smoke. That’s because the wind can carry smoke and ash much farther than the fires themselves reach. In July, as the fires were raging, Al Jazeera’s Nina Montagu-Smith reported ash falling on the wine-region town of Libourne, more than 100km (62 miles) from the source of the fires on Cap Ferret, a narrow peninsula on France’s Atlantic coast, west of Bordeaux. Libourne is close to the important wine centre of Saint-Emilion.

“When I visited Arcachon, a seaside town just across the bay from Cap Ferret, we could see the fires on the peninsula. Within hours, the sky had blackened, and the smoke was thick over Arcachon town,” Montagu-Smith said.

The spreading smoke “may have caused a bit of ‘smoke taint’”, Karlsson explained.

Smoke can damage grapes by penetrating their skin and releasing a smoky flavour during fermentation. That affects the taste and aroma, and lowers the overall quality of the juice and resulting wine. Rinsing the grapes when absorption has already occurred does little to help, he added.

Another issue is that wine tourism has been affected. Wineries view tourism as a significant additional source of revenue at a time when wine consumption is falling generally.

“Wine tourism is becoming a very important aspect of the industry,” Karlsson said. He and his wife organise private tasting trips to vineyards, including in Bordeaux and other parts of France.

“Large numbers of wineries in Bordeaux are open to it these days, although it used to be very hard to get into them,” he said.

Amid the wildfires, tourists are worried about venturing into some areas, he added. In late July, as the Gironde wildfire raged, the French government also appealed to the public to avoid the region.

What other challenges are winemakers facing?

Besides the wildfires and scorching heat, an ongoing drought in Western Europe is also affecting grape growers.

Critical water sources such as the Danube River and the Rhine have retreated drastically, affecting producers in several countries.

In eastern France, the Doubs River has all but vanished in some places, revealing parched riverbeds. Authorities have been forced to enforce water-use restrictions in many areas. In July, France’s Ecological Transition Minister Monique Barbut said at a crisis meeting that this year’s drought was “exceptional” in its intensity, and had occurred despite average rainfall.

Grape-growing regions traditionally depend on rainfall because authorities have banned irrigation to force vines to seek groundwater naturally. The main reason for this was to ensure higher quality, as unregulated irrigation can cause grapes to absorb too much water, bloating the fruit and diluting the flavour of wine.

But vines need sufficient water to produce big, juicy berries. During droughts, when vines don’t get adequate water, they draw it from the grapes instead, causing the berries to shrink, experts say.

Stephane Vignon, a winemaker in the village of Verzenay, northeastern France, told Reuters that some bunches of grapes weighed nearly 30 percent less than their typical weight this year.

The combined crises brought the harvest season in France forward to August this year, much earlier than the traditional September harvest time, as farmers feared losses from accelerated ripening and reduced acidity.

Compounding this, the wine industry in France is facing weaker sales due to shifting habits, as globally, people are drinking less wine.

In the United States, the world’s largest wine-drinking country and France’s biggest buyer, wine consumption went from 3.3 billion litres (872 million gallons) in 2020 to 2.7 billion litres (717 million gallons) in 2024, according to the California-based Wine Institute.

US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on French wine in 2025, and repeated threats to hike the taxes, have not helped declining sales.

“Climate change for the foreseeable future is manageable,” Karlsson noted, pointing out that grape growers are starting to adapt their farming behaviours by planting more tolerant grape varieties, for example. But fewer wine drinkers? “That’s the bigger issue,” he concluded.