Bordeaux has lost a quarter of its AOC vineyard

The Gironde is the département that contains Bordeaux, and almost every vine in it is declared under an appellation. Agreste, the statistics service of the Ministry of Agriculture, publishes the area in production for appellation wine in the Gironde each year from 2010 to 2025, with the hectolitres produced from it. Its long series has been aligned with the 2020 agricultural census and back-calculated to 2010, as its data page says, and the 2025 figures are provisional. It is a short series, sixteen years, and it starts at its highest point. In 2010 the Gironde had 114,898 hectares of appellation vineyard in production. In 2025, on the provisional figure, it had 86,597. The difference is 28,301 hectares, or 24.6 per cent: about a quarter of the appellation vineyard has gone in fifteen years.

The shape of the fall matters more than the total. For the first ten years the area drifted down slowly and unevenly: 110,710 hectares in 2011, back above 113,000 in 2013, and 112,734 in 2019, which is only 2,164 hectares below 2010. The series then shows six consecutive annual falls, and from 2022 each is larger in proportion than the one before. The area dropped 1.8 per cent in 2020, 0.7 per cent in 2021, 1.7 per cent in 2022 and 4.3 per cent in 2023. In 2024 it fell by 8,507 hectares, 8.2 per cent, and in 2025 by a further 8,369 hectares, 8.8 per cent. Between 2023 and 2025 the Gironde lost 16,876 hectares of appellation vineyard, 16.3 per cent of what it had, and nearly three-fifths, 59.6 per cent, of the whole decline since 2010. Put the other way: it took thirteen years to lose the first 11,425 hectares and two years to lose the next 16,876.

The series counts hectares in production for appellation wine. It does not say what happened to a hectare that leaves it, whether the vines were pulled up, the plot was left unworked, or the land was declared under another heading. The series does not reach back before 2010 either, so it cannot say whether 2010 was a peak or merely a high point. A second, longer series that we hold, for all vineyard in production for wine in the Gironde, appellation or not, runs from 1900 to 2016 and gives some perspective. In the seven years both series cover, 2010 to 2016, the appellation area was between 96 and 99 per cent of the long series' figure, so the two measures are close. The lowest figure for all wine vineyard in the 117 years of the long series is 96,350 hectares, in 1981. The provisional 2025 appellation figure of 86,597 hectares sits nearly ten thousand hectares below that. For scale at the other end, the long series puts all wine vineyard in the Gironde at 145,300 hectares in 1932, and since 1990 that area was highest in 2004, at 124,627 hectares, before falling to 114,074 by 2016.

Production has fallen faster than area. The Gironde made 5,574,878 hectolitres of appellation wine in 2010 and 2,929,254 in 2025, a fall of 47.5 per cent: the volume has nearly halved while the area has fallen by a quarter. The gap between the two is the crop per hectare. Taking the series in four slices, the average appellation area was 112,829 hectares in 2010–2012, 112,214 in 2013–2016, 112,210 in 2017–2020 and 100,608 in 2021–2025. Production over the same slices averaged 5.44 million hectolitres, then 5.16 million, 4.59 million and 3.63 million. The crop per hectare went 48.2 hectolitres, 46.0, 40.9 and 36.0. So in the first three slices the area barely moved while the crop per hectare fell by about 15 per cent; in the last slice both fell together.

The year-by-year crop figures show the same thing from another side. In seven of the sixteen years the Gironde's appellation crop came in below 40 hectolitres per hectare: 2013 at 33.9, 2017 at 31.2, and then every year from 2021 to 2025, at 35.0, 38.3, 37.6, 35.2 and 33.8. Before 2021 a year below 40 was an exception; since 2021 there has not been a year above it. Seven years reached 45 hectolitres per hectare or more: every year from 2010 to 2016 except 2013, and 2018. The highest, 54.3, was 2016. The largest appellation crop in the series is also 2016, at 6,027,988 hectolitres. The smallest is 2025.

Three things can be read directly off the series, and we stop at those. The appellation vineyard of the Gironde is about a quarter smaller than it was in 2010, and nearly three-fifths of that loss came in the last two harvests. The crop per hectare has run below 40 hectolitres for five consecutive years, which it had not done before in this series. And appellation production in 2025, at 2.93 million hectolitres on the provisional figure, is a little over half of what the same département produced fifteen years earlier. What the series does not record is why any of it happened, and this issue does not say.

Vineyard area and production: Source : Agreste - Statistique agricole annuelle - SSP/ Ministère en charge de l'agriculture, séries longues 2010–2025; 2025 provisional, data as fixed on 30 March 2026. Long series: Schauberger et al. (2022), GFZ Data Services, doi 10.5880/PIK.2021.001, CC-BY 4.0.