Wildfires in France have caused damage to homes, businesses and forests, and now they threaten to damage the French wine industry.
Authorities ordered the evacuation of nearly 60,000 people from the area near Bordeaux, France, where vineyards produce about 680 million bottles per year, according to Vineyards Bordeaux, an investment advising firm.
"The grapes right now are right between when they turn from green to red, and that's the worst time for smoke to hit them," Ray Isle, executive wine editor for Food & Wine, told CBS News. He added that if the smoke stays and sticks to the grapes, "You're gonna have wine that tastes like licking an ashtray."
In 2020, the California wine industry lost about $3.7 billion from wildfires, The Wine Institute reported.
"It can be a big problem," Isle told CBS.
The wine and spirits industry in France had already suffered a blow in response to President Donald Trump's tariffs. French customs said exports to the United States have dropped 39% in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared with the same time in 2024.
"The big problem in terms of financial damage is that three years down the line, when these red wines are released, people are gonna remember ... that the whole place caught on fire," Isle said.
He noted that filtering will help some, but high-end wines can't do that without affecting the taste.
A wildfire hit the region in 2022, and French President Emmanuel Macron told people living in the area to implement forestry rules designed to prevent fires, such as removing bushes and trimming trees near homes. Those rules weren't really enforced, and experts believe that may be why the fires spread through the region so fast this year.
French prosecutors said the fire was started by a brush-clearing machine near a high-voltage power line outside of Saumos, France, which is in the middle of the Gironde fire. The investigation into why the fire spread so fast could take months, fire officials said.
Extreme heat from a heat dome likely contributed. The fire got so hot that it created a fire cloud for the first time in France. It made the inferno even harder to stop, officials said.
"There were very few actual changes made after 2022," Arthur Guérin-Turcq, an academic at the Sorbonne University, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the aftermath of the 2022 fires, told The New York Times. "There were no new fuel breaks or land management adjustments, and very few new firebreaks were created." After 2022, he said, "We basically went right back to business as usual."
Biganos, France, Mayor Bruno Lafon estimated that about 20% of residents with land near the forest had followed the brush-clearing rules, despite his repeated pleas.
In Lanton, where 15 homes were burned this summer, Mayor Loïc Ballonguen estimated only about 10-20% had followed the rules. "I think we all fell a bit short," he told The Times.
"We're putting firefighters in harm's way because there are houses that need defending but haven't taken steps to make themselves defendable," said Éric Brocardi, a veteran firefighter and spokesman for the national union. "Honestly we're even asking ourselves if, in the future, firefighters are going to put their lives on the line for houses that haven't followed legal brush-clearing rules?"
Source - https://www.upi.com
