Like many Bordeaux vintners, Bastien Mercier expanded his vineyard to meet what seemed to be an unquenchable thirst for his wine. He bought some land, rented some more and took on two employees to help with the workload, reports The Times.
Now, however, both have been laid off as a slump in demand for red wines has taken hold, for Bordeaux in particular, that has precipitated the gravest crisis in the region since the 1970s.
“We are all in the merde,” Mercier said as he explained how he planned to replace 25 hectares of his vines with Christmas trees, paulownias, cereal crops and solar panels.
His words offered an insight into the harsh reality behind the façade of luxury and wealth in Bordeaux. More than 1,300 of the region’s 5,000 or so winemakers say they are in financial trouble, with many laden by debts and unable to pay their bills after failing to foresee the end of the 1990s claret boom. Depression among vintners is widespread and suicides not uncommon. “And the worst of it is that I can’t see an end to it,” Didier Cousiney, 66, said, the president of Viti 33, an association of vineyard owners fighting to save a sector that they say is in danger.
The scars of economic failure are visible across Bordeaux’s patchwork of vineyards, which are now interspersed with barren fields where vines have been ripped out by the yellow mechanical diggers that have become a feature of the landscape this year.
Most vines have been burnt, and, here and there, mounds still smoulder in a testimony to the €38-million (£32 million) package of subsidies offered by the government to 1,209 Bordeaux winemakers who have ripped up their vines in an attempt to curb over-production.