Eastern France | Bitter harvests in the vineyards

(Domblans) They expect to lose between 60 and 70% of their harvest, sometimes more: for winegrowers in the Jura, in eastern France, the 2024 vintage should produce wines of good quality but in very insufficient quantity, putting some farms in difficulty.

Pruning shears in hand, Benoît Sermier searches for grapes on his vines. On a plot at the foot of the hillsides, he has planted Savagnin, a grape variety typical of the Jura vineyard, but after a year of “complicated” weather, the fruit is rare.

“Typically, I’m on a vine that produces two very small bunches, whereas in a classic year, we would have at least 15 bunches. It’s really not much,” he laments on this first day of the harvest.

In 2023, the harvest took place at the end of August. If it is so late this year, starting on average around September 10, it is because of a frost episode that caused a lot of damage, and delayed flowering: between April 22 and 25, night temperatures fell to -1 °C, sometimes -2 °C.

Not much stock

In the middle of spring, “the vines had already grown three or four centimetres, it was the beginning of vegetation, with two open leaves,” explains the 33-year-old winemaker, showing a vine shoot.

Other episodes of spring frost had already been recorded in 2017, 2019, and 2021. Each time, more than half of the production capacity had been lost.

“It’s starting to be seriously annoying for the farms, especially the young ones who have just set up,” warns the man who is also president of the cooperative winery “Fruitière vinicole d’Arbois”, which brings together 85 winegrowers. “They need to sell wine to earn a living, but previous years have not allowed them to build up much stock.”

Depending on the exposure or altitude of the plots, the approximately 220 Jura farms have not all been affected in the same way. For Benoît Sermier and his brother Mathieu, who took over and expanded the family estate together, even if the worst was avoided, they had to reduce their teams.

“Normally there are 35 to 40 of us in the ranks. Today there are only 12 of us being cut, there is a big difference. The Jura is hiring a lot less this year,” he concedes.

“From the memory of a winegrower…”

After more than four hours of effort going up the slopes with buckets weighing several kilos, lunch, washed down with an Arbois Trousseau 2020, silver medalist at the general agricultural competition, offers a welcome respite to the harvesters. Around the table unfolded at the foot of the truck, they enjoy one of the rare rays of sunshine of the year.

“Since October, we have had very difficult weather conditions, with rain and wind,” says Patrick Rolet, an organic winegrower and cattle breeder in Cramans, looking back on the last twelve months. “Imagine being outside all day with 20, 30 millimeters of rain, and up until July 15 like that… It was every three or four days that we had to start the treatments again, especially in organic farming. In my memory as a winegrower, I don’t know if we have ever had so much rainfall.”

These precipitations and the persistent humidity in the vines also facilitated the spread of mildew, which ravaged many plots. For many professionals, it was necessary to take care of the vines against this fungus to save the grapes… of 2025.

“We are facing a historic loss over the last 25 years,” Olivier Badoureaux, director of the Jura Wine Interprofessional Committee, summed up for AFP. “A good harvest is around 80,000 hectolitres. This year, if we do between 25,000 and 30,000, that will already be good. Fortunately, the quality should be there.”