2026-08-07
The first grapes for Crémant de Bordeaux were cut on Thursday, opening what Bordeaux wine officials say is the earliest harvest the region has ever seen and setting up a 2026 vintage that is expected to be smaller than usual.
The start came almost 15 days earlier than in 2025, which had already been considered an early year. Bernard Farges, president of the Bordeaux Wine Council, or CIVB, said the pace is likely among the earliest seen anywhere in France. He said the shift is another clear sign of how climate change is moving vineyard calendars forward.
“This is a level of earliness we have never known,” Farges said. “We are almost 15 days earlier than last year, which was already early compared with 20 or 30 years ago.”
In Bordeaux, the harvest for sparkling wine traditionally marks the opening of the wider picking season. The grapes now being brought in are destined for crémant, the region’s sparkling wine, which accounts for about 4% of total Bordeaux production. The broader vineyard covers about 86,000 hectares in southwestern France and is the country’s largest appellation wine region.
Bordeaux Families, a cooperative that says it is the leading producer of Crémant de Bordeaux with about three million bottles a year, said it had begun harvesting and would use 400 pickers over the next three weeks. That early start changes staffing, transport and winery schedules at a time when producers are also watching crop size closely.
So far, the CIVB is not giving an official forecast in hectoliters, tons or yield per hectare. Farges said only that he expects “small quantities,” describing it as an early qualitative reading rather than a statistical estimate. The main reason, he said, is a lack of rain during the growing season, which limited berry growth and left clusters smaller than normal.
At the same time, he said vineyard health is excellent. “The sanitary condition of the vines is perfect,” he said, adding that quality looks promising. In wine terms, that means growers are entering harvest with clean fruit and without widespread disease pressure, even if the volume is likely to be lower.
The accelerated season follows a weather pattern that pushed the vines quickly through their growth cycle. According to Bordeaux wine officials, a mild and wet winter was followed by generally warm conditions and then several heat waves in late spring and early summer. That sequence brought forward ripening and moved picking dates deeper into August.
Farges said the change is part of a longer trend that growers now see clearly in the field. Parcels that were harvested at the end of September in the 1990s are now often picked at the end of August, he said. In France, harvest dates have been moving earlier since the 1980s, and viticulture researchers and trade groups have long treated that trend as one of the clearest agricultural markers of warming temperatures.
For wineries, an earlier harvest creates more than a symbolic change in the calendar. It compresses hiring for seasonal labor, shifts delivery and pressing schedules, and can move bottling and sales planning for sparkling wines and early-market releases. If the crop is indeed smaller, as Bordeaux officials currently expect, that could also tighten supply later in the commercial cycle, especially for categories with limited production.
The early start also comes as parts of Gironde have been dealing with wildfire concerns. Farges said there was no issue at this stage with possible smoke taint from the major fire that burned about 42,000 hectares in western Gironde, noting that the biggest estates in Médoc and Graves were not reached by the flames. He also pointed to the 2022 Landiras fire, when some vineyards were closer to the burn area but the region still produced what he described as a very good vintage.