Bordeaux Gets Heart Ripped Out

Filed in archive French Wines on February 1, 2007

Bordeaux is still feeling more than just a sting when it comes to competing with wine from all over the world. Families who have been in the business for generations are literally having to rip out their vineyards because prices have sunk to such an all time low in the market.

From Tearing at the heart of Bordeaux's vineyards:

They call it arrachage, or ripping out, a word that evokes the emotional side of the crisis - tearing out excess vines and, along with them, the very spirit of the people who have nurtured their grapes for generations.

"It's our heart that is being ripped out," Josette Prévot told me recently as we slogged along the snow-covered rows of her 24,000 vines in Bayas, just west of Bordeaux.

The Bordeaux region's southerly vineyards are the hardest hit in France as oversupply from "New World" competition sends prices into a spin.

"I feel awful doing this," Prévot said, her hand on her heart. "Two years ago I never would have thought it possible." In a few weeks about 21,000 vines will be uprooted by a mechanical digger and piled high in the denuded fields. The Prévots dread witnessing the final blow, the burning of the wood.

[...] The prosperous Médoc and St. Emillion appellations have not been affected by the collapse of the market. Their well-known brands continue to sell well at high prices. But low-end discounted wines have slumped to around €1 a bottle in local supermarkets.

Under a program largely financed by the European Union, the Prévots and others will qualify for €12,500, or $16,000, for each hectare, or 2.4 acres, razed. But that is small comfort for abandoning a way of life. One grouping of growers has called this the "agony of the wine business" in southwest France.