Why Bordeaux is drowning in wine

To put it mildly, things aren’t looking good for Bordeaux’s wine business right now. As the châteaux owners busy themselves with hosting the region’s annual showpiece, the en primeur tastings (a springtime preview of the latest vintage for international buyers and media), France’s most famous wine region is in turmoil.

The harsh, simple fact is that Bordeaux is making a lot more wine than it can sell, the equivalent of around 150m surplus bottles a year. The French no longer lap up the cheaper stuff in the supermarkets, and prices for bulk wine have plummeted to unsustainable levels, with the average price fetched by producers for a tonneau (a 900-litre barrel) being around half (€943) what it costs them to produce (€1,800).

No wonder as many as 1,200 winegrowers (around a quarter of the region’s total) are, according to a recent report by French bank Crédit Agricole, deep in negotiations to restructure their debts. And no wonder so many have taken up a French government-backed subsidised scheme to dig up their vines: around 20,000 hectares have been removed in the past three years alone.

Although there’s no immediate prospect of the region’s famous elite – the 70 or so châteaux responsible for some of the world’s most expensive and admired wines – grubbing up the cabernet and merlot on what is still some of the most valuable vineyard real estate in the world, even they are entering crisis mode. There are persistent whispers of unsold inventory and cashflow crises circulating on the wine-trade grapevine, with producers widely deemed to have set their prices too high on release.

This has led some to question how long Bordeaux’s fine wine trade can carry on with its distinctive way of selling its top bottles – a form of futures trading ( en primeur), where the wines are sold before they are finished and bottled, with buying decisions based on tastings of barrel samples. For years this worked for both buyer and seller: the buyer was rewarded for taking a risk on how the wine would develop by getting a better price than they would for the finished wine, and the châteaux got the cashflow to fund their work on the next vintage. As fine wine sales have slowed, buyers have been able to snap up mature wines from excellent vintages at lower cost than the en primeur price. As Laura Taylor of UK fine-wine merchant Private Cellar says, “What’s the point of buying en primeur if the wine is going to be cheaper in five years’ time?”

For the elite, much is riding on how well the small but good-quality 2025 vintage is received and how they price it. Further down the scale, the Bordeaux authorities are pinning hopes on a new category of chillable, easy-drinking, low-in-tannin light reds, aimed at younger drinkers. Somewhat confusingly, this category will have the official name of “Claret”, a term traditionally used as a synonym for all Bordeaux reds. This has caused consternation for British merchants who have claret brands of several decades’ standing that they fear won’t fit the rules of the new category. As James Tanner, of Shropshire-based family wine merchant Tanners puts it, “they’ve really shot themselves in the foot – it just shows how desperate they are.”

I’ll be curious to taste the new breed of claret wines when they emerge later this year, even if, like Tanner, I think they’d be better labelled by another, less common Bordeaux term  which was traditionally used for the region’s dark rosés: clairet. In the meantime I’ll carry on enjoying what I think of as true claret – affordable, appetisingly fresh, crunchy, food-friendly red wines that Bordeaux does better than anywhere, such as Tanners own-label Super Claret 2019 (£16.70), the delightfully supple Château La Rose de Vitrac 2022 (£13.95, Haynes Hanson & Clark), and the endlessly drinkable Château la Gravière, Côtes de Bourg 2022 (£12.95, The Wine Society).