The Bordeaux wine crisis in numbers

Pulled up on purpose

The Gironde is the largest wine department in France, ahead of the Hérault. It had 100,737 hectares of vines in production in 2024 and 91,543 in 2025, by Agreste’s count. It is shrinking on purpose. From August 2023 to May 2026 about 21,000 hectares of vines were uprooted across the department, 12,284 of them with public money paid on each hectare and about 8,700 without aid.

The pressure is heaviest at the bottom of the market, on generic red Bordeaux. That is the wine whose price broke first, and a hectare of Bordeaux rouge lost 60.6% of its value between 2018 and 2025.

The 3 uprooting plans

The Gironde plan was an arrachage sanitaire, an uprooting for reasons of plant health, approved by the European Commission on November 3, 2023, with its decree in the Journal Officiel on November 19. A grower who stopped altogether had to leave the plot fallow, return it to nature, or plant it to forest; one who kept farming could also plant another crop on it.

The national plan of 2024 was open to every French vineyard, not only Bordeaux. By September 16, 2025, when the agriculture ministry answered a question in the Assemblée nationale, 27,500 hectares had been put forward, 15,600 had actually been pulled up, and €50 million had been paid.

The second national plan, of 2026, kept the aid at €4,000 a hectare and budgeted €130 million. By March 2026 about 28,000 hectares had been requested across France, with the Gironde first among the departments asking. Agreste expected the plan to take out about 8,000 hectares more in the Gironde.

Less sold, for less

Bordeaux shipped 2.98 million hectoliters in the 12 months to the end of March 2026, 12% less than a year earlier. Abroad, red Bordeaux lost 19% of its export value at the start of 2026, with volume down 8% and the average value of each unit shipped down about 12%.

The bulk price tells the same story. Generic red Bordeaux sold in bulk at an average of €877 a tonneau over the 2025 to 2026 campaign. The production cost, drawn from the accounts of some 60 estates, was about €1,300 a tonneau. In October 2026 the CIVB published a reference price of €1,100 a tonneau, halfway between the 2. In 2023 the state and the European Union had financed a crisis distillation of up to 3 million hectoliters across France. The budget ran to €200 million, at €75 a hectoliter for appellation wine.

The land has followed the wine. A hectare of AOC Médoc (opens in a new tab) that fetched €55,000 in 2018 fetched €10,000 in 2025: less than one fifth. The famous names fell less, though they fell: a hectare of Pauillac (opens in a new tab) went from €2.2 million to €1.7 million. The classified growths have a different story, told each spring in their en primeur prices.

A buyer who stopped buying

The first blow came from China. Until 2018 the price of generic red Bordeaux could be forecast with some confidence. Then, between 2018 and 2019, it fell from an all-time high to levels not seen since 2012. The economists Stephen Bazen and Jean-Marie Cardebat traced the fall to the collapse of Chinese demand for Bordeaux, brought on by a combination of shocks. Writing in 2022, they described a structural break in the market. It was not the region’s first surplus, but it was the break that the old price forecasts did not survive.

Demand weakened further from 2019 to 2025, in years when French vineyards also went through heat waves, drought, frost, and hail. A region planted for a buyer who stopped buying has 2 ways out: sell something else, or grow less. The uprooting plans are the second.