In Champagne, growers reaped their earliest harvest on record, racing to pick grapes before rising sugar levels pushed potential alcohol too high. Output there is expected to be roughly halved, with grape bunch weights at their lowest in 20 years.
In southern France’s Languedoc-Roussillon wine region, by contrast, production is forecast to rebound 5 percent from last year’s weak harvest, which was about 13 percent below the five-year average. Even with that recovery, output this year remains 8 percent below average.
Conditions had initially looked promising, with good grape development and low disease pressure. But “the hot and dry conditions of the summer degraded this potential,” Agreste said.
If confirmed, the sub-3.4 billion-liter crop would be France’s smallest since 1957 — a nearly 70-year low.
And wine is only one casualty of Europe’s brutal summer. Farmer group Copa-Cogeca estimated in a report published last week that maize losses reached 50 to 70 percent in Slovenia, 40 percent in France and 20 to 25 percent in Italy, reaching 70 percent in some unirrigated areas. Croatia expects fruit and grape output to fall around 30 percent.
French Environment Minister Monique Barbut has put the summer’s economic damage at €10 billion to €15 billion, or as much as 0.5 percent of GDP.
Paris unveiled more than €1 billion in emergency farm aid Friday, though agricultural groups say the package falls short.