Usually in August, the farmers that cultivate France’s famed Champagne grapes would be enjoying some down time ahead of the annual late-summer harvest.
But this year, after an exceptionally hot summer, the harvest began in early August, weeks ahead of schedule, at a time when many growers and seasonal workers were still on vacation. That set off a scramble to find grape-pickers in a shortened harvesting window in order to ensure that the year’s crop wasn’t ruined.
“We had to rally everyone on short notice,” said Maxime Toubart, a grower in Champagne, adding that it forced vineyards “to organize the harvest somewhat at the last minute.”
France is facing an extraordinarily early grape harvest after months of hot and dry conditions and multiple summer heat waves.
While early harvests have been happening for a while, growers say that the trend has accelerated in recent years, forcing grapes to be picked earlier. This year, they say, the Champagne harvest is running about three weeks to a month ahead of schedule.
“Over the past 20 years, we have observed a significant shift in harvest dates,” Mr. Toubart, who is co-president of the Comité Champagne, a local trade association.
Grape picking now begins about 30 days earlier than it did two decades ago, he said in a phone interview. His father, who was also a cultivator, routinely harvested in October. This year, Mr. Toubart said, picking began on Aug. 6.
The early harvest resulted in a logistical challenge for Mr. Toubart, who is one of roughly 20,000 growers in the Champagne region. Around 120,000 people are employed during the harvest each year across the region but many were still on vacation in early August, he said.
“We’ve been a bit thrown by this harvest,” Mr. Toubart said. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”
He explained that “the vines start growing earlier, winters are milder than before, and weather conditions throughout spring and summer actually accelerate the vines’ growth cycle.”
France has seen four heat waves since May, totaling 63 days of heat wave conditions, according to the country’s weather service. Daily and monthly records for summer heat were broken this year, and a heat wave in July was longer than one in 2003 that killed 15,000 people in France.
Lucas Pfister, who grows grapes in Brittany, in northwestern France, spent a chunk of the summer irrigating his grapevines because of a lack of rain.
“It’s not what you want to do,” Mr. Pfister, who has more than two decades of experience in vineyards in Argentina, Italy and France, said in a phone interview.
Winemakers agree that the climate is changing. “It’s a fact,” Mr. Toubart said.
The heat cuts both ways for the vineyards.
A lack of moisture means less mildew, a good thing for the grapes. “We could say that global warming has actually been quite favorable for the vines in recent years,” Mr. Toubart said.
At the same time, the longer that grapes grow under blazing sun, the earlier they ripen and the sweeter they get, which in turn means a higher alcohol content. That is one reason for the early harvest: to make sure the grapes don’t get too sweet or the wine too alcoholic.
“The heat has been a problem,” said Tegwen Naveos, a wine retailer in Brittany who has been in the industry since 1993. Besides the challenges that the hot conditions bring to growers, he said that the extreme heat had made customers less thirsty for wine.
“Sales have been quite difficult since the end of June,” he said, adding that many people have turned to beer or alcohol-free drinks.
The extreme weather, which has brought drought and wildfires, is just one of the many challenges facing France’s wine industry, along with changing drinking habits and President Trump’s tariffs.
But Mr. Naveos hoped that the crop would adapt to the changing conditions.
“We have to trust that the wine grapes will adapt to all of this, hard times and climate change,” he added. “Nature will always find its way.”
Nazaneen Ghaffar contributed reporting.
