The nectar of the gods, French wines have a reputation for being cultivated in a sun-kissed vineyard surrounding a honey-stoned chateau, owned by a Hollywood star like Leonardo DiCaprio, or a Gallic aristo whose family escaped the guillotine. Jean-François is neither. And he is not the only vigneron who is struggling. Things are far from rosé for France’s small winemakers, as two hundred militants made clear outside the Prefecture in Bordeaux one Thursday last month. They follow the thousand who protested in the city last December, when vignerons hung a human effigy outside the doors of the Bordeaux Wine Council, to raise awareness for grape-growers at risk of suicide. “Every day there is a suicide in agriculture,” Didier Cousiney, president of the Viti 33 collective informed the crowd.

In the Bordeaux area alone, 500 vignerons are looking in the bottom of the glass and seeing financial ruin. And you can add to these the growers nearing retirement who cannot find buyers for their vineyards. Like Jean-François. In the Medoc, land prices are actually sinking.

Jean-François would like to simply abandon his vines. He cannot, because it is illegal. Abandoned vines are vectors for disease, which can spread to other vineyards. Vines must be either cultivated or grubbed up. But grubbing costs €2,000 per hectare, money Jean-François does not have.

Crisis in the French wine industry affects more than viticulteurs. In France, wine is not merely a drink: it’s a national symbol, the liquid affirmation of l’Art de vivre à la française. If you opened the arteries of Marianne, you would find them coursing with a Bordeaux Appellations d’Origine Contrôlée, the official certification for wine grown in the geographical region and made with requisite skill. Until 1981, French children were allowed to drink wine in school. So, when the wine industry turns sour, France’s identity suffers a hangover.

As does its income. Wine is France’s second biggest export after aircraft, worth about €15 billion a year according to the Fédération des Exportateurs de Vins et Spiritueux de France (FEVS).

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What’s going wrong in the vineyards of La Belle France? Jean-François’s eloquent gestures indicate some of the causes. Doubtless French winegrowers have been complaining about the weather since the Gauls planted the first native vines in the fifth century BC. But in the last five years, the weather has lurched from one Biblical extreme to another. We’ve had drought, which did for my own few vines last year; we’ve had flooding; we’ve had hailstorms. A late frost in April 2021 affected 80% of the nation’s vineyards.

Such was the desperation of viticulteurs then that vineyards were heated overnight with candles and paraffin heaters, to keep the frost off the delicate buds of the fruit. The sight of the vineyards of Bordeaux, the sacred centre of the French wine industry, lit by geometrically exact lines of candlelight was magnificent, but the image ultimately came to symbolise the powerlessness of humans in the face of Mother Nature. After le gel historique, there were few climate change deniers in Bordeaux’s vineyards. According to the European Environmental Agency, France is suffering the biggest economic losses caused by climate change of any country in the world. The Hexagon took a hit of €4.2 billion in 2020 due to climate change.

Merlot is the crucial grape variety of the Bordeaux region, making up 60% of the area’s vineyards. It will be the first wine grape to show the impact of climate change. “The flavour of French wines will be more alcoholic, less acidic and less aromatic,” Agnès Destrac-Irvine, of Bordeaux University’s experimental VitAdapt vineyard told Time magazine in 2020. In other words, Bordeaux Merlot as the world knows and drinks it is facing extinction.

Jean-François grows Merlot.

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But it is too easy to see the issue as simply one of supply. Since 1998, Italy has often outranked France to be the globe’s number one producer of wine — last year, Italy produced 50.3 million hectolitres, compared to France’s 44.2 million hectolitres — and it is not unknown for France to fall behind Spain in terms of volume. This fall from the gold position in terms of quantity may irk Gallic pride, but France’s real problem is that it cannot shift the stuff it does produce. There is an issue with demand. Take the Bordeaux region: it produces about 480 million cases a year, yet sells only 440 million cases, and much of that is flogged off at knock-down, bargain-basement price.

Why won’t it sell? This state of affairs is largely home-grown because — sacré bleu! — the French are drinking less wine (with the exception of champagne), and exports are insufficient to cover the gap. In the Fifties, the average French adult drank 150 litres of wine per year, about half a bottle a day. Wine, especially red wine, was the beverage of choice for lunch and dinner. Industrial workers would have a “rouge” in the bar tabac before clocking on at the factory, and farm workers a few sips throughout the day to keep warm in the fields.

But according to a report published by the Kantar Institut last year, the French have reduced their consumption of red wine by 32% since 2011 alone. Wine consumption per person in France is now dipping below 40 litres per year, and some 38% of the French never drink wine at all. In fact, France is one of the fastest-growing markets in the global boom in alcohol-free drinks.

The reasons are numerous, but generational difference is key. Among retirees, wine consumption is barely changed: people in their sixties and seventies grew up with wine on the table at every meal. For them, wine remains part of France’s patrimoine, or cultural heritage. But they are, in the way of all flesh, dying off. And, some argue, failing to induce wine appreciation in the young. Those between 18 and 35, meanwhile, are more likely to be drinking water at the table, and beer at the bar (beer accounted for 39% of the expenditure on alcohol among French people aged under 35 in 2021. Wine just 27%.)

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Denis Saverot, editor of La Revue des Vins de France magazine, blames “our bourgeois, technocratic elite with their campaigns against drink-driving and alcoholism, lumping wine in with every other type of alcohol, even though it should be regarded as totally different”. French TV and cinema is currently running a government message not to toast health — “Sante!” — with alcohol since alcohol is unhealthy. (“La bonne santé n’a rien à voir avec l’alcool”.) Official messaging is working: according to a poll by the Ifop institute, 27% of French people intended to participate in Dry January this year, although you’d be hard-pressed to find one of them in a French winegrowing region. Nicolas Carreau, president of the Blaye Côtes de Bordeaux appellation, told regional daily Sud-Ouest, “we are for limits and reasonable consumption”, but “Dry January contributes to smashing our culture”.

But looking at the sorry state of the industry, an older French wine-lover might experience déja vu. Because the sector has been in crisis since the Sixties, what with the decline in drinking and the rise in New World wines. What saved French wine last time was China.

Pouring into the market for Bordeaux after the 2008 global financial crisis, Chinese consumers soaked up the flood of plonk that no one else wanted. But no longer. French wine shipments to China dropped by nearly 30% in 2022, a shift led from by the elite: the CCP, as part of its anti-corruption drive, has instituted rules on the amount that can be spent on alcohol at state functions.

And it’s not just wine they’ve stop buying. For the decade after 2011, the Chinese were the top foreign investors in Bordeaux vineyards, buying around 170 chateaus. Now they are only conspicuous by their absence, following capital controls by Beijing intended to keep domestic currency within China’s borders, and sustain the yuan. (The failure of Chinese managers to understand the French worker’s absolute commitment to a max 35-hour week did little for harmony in the vineyards.) Symbolically, the gates of the Chateau de Grand Branet, owned by Chinese conglomerate Dalian Haichang Group, are locked with a rusty chain.

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Other major markets for French wine are also turning up their noses at the stuff. The UK has been successfully wooed by the cheap, easy-drinking wines of Australia, South Africa, Chile and Argentina. More to the point, British wine is booming. And the French — incroyable! — are investing in it. Henkell Freixenet, Pommery and Tattinger have all bought vineyards in southern England. America, meanwhile, has implemented tariffs and discovered it has no taste for the bottom half of Bordeaux’s production barrel, although it remains an outlet for “fine wines”.

But for how long? To offset the decline in domestic consumption, French winemakers niftily moved upmarket during the 2010s, selling expensive wine abroad — the Saint-Emilions, the Margaux, the premiere cuvées. This shiny wine bubble, which diverted attention from the structural problems in the industry, has now burst, courtesy of inflation and the cost-of-living crisis. Winemakers’ hopes of forever increasing the price on the label have a firm cork in them.

The French wine industry may be over a barrel, but it is not dead yet. Some winegrowers are shifting wholesale to eco-friendliness. By 2025, 100% of winemakers in Bordeaux will have some form of organic or sustainable certification, or be transitioning towards getting one. This is a good bet, since the data on French wine consumption when mined suggests that remaining drinkers are looking to buy better wine, and are more “engaged” with their choice.

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Meanwhile, the bigger chateaux have already diversified into wine tourism —which, pre-pandemic, was welcoming more than 24 million enthusiasts every year. Certain destinations are enhancing the experience with some of the most expensive art installations in Europe: Provence’s Château La Coste has pieces by Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, plus a “railcar” sculpture by Bob Dylan. (Yes, that Bob Dylan.)

All well and good, but no salvation for small wine producers like Jean-François in the here and now. They are calling on the French government to subsidise the pulling-up of vines in Bordeaux’s less prestigious areas to the tune of €10,000 per hectare, with about 10,000 hectares going to the digger. Officially, member states of the European Union are prevented from releasing funds for grubbing-up, but never underestimate the French ability to fudge and evade the rules. (The European Commission once memorably allowed France leeway on its budget “because it is France”).

The vignerons also have expectations of President Macron, a celebrated, self-avowed oenophile who drinks two glasses of wine a day, one with lunch and one with dinner. The Revue du Vin de France named President Macron “personality of the year” in 2022. He picked up his award in person, telling the audience: “You are the masters of an art which allows us to shine around the world.”

While my neighbour Jean-François waits for the politicians, he continues to prune his vines under the grey skies of Southwest France. He is gritting his teeth, preparing for another year of financial loss. Another bitter harvest.

Think bullfighting and you probably conjure a sequin-flashing, cape-twirling arena in the Spanish city of Pamplona, but southern France has a bullfighting tradition dating back to the year dot — or 1289, at least. That year, the Running of the Bulls was first recorded at Bayonne, down the coast from Bordeaux. Hemingway, in Death in the Afternoon, his classic account of bullfighting, was mighty sniffy about any corrida north of the Pyrenees, writing that: “Prospective spectators are warned not to take seriously any bullfights held in France.” The irony: currently, bullfighting is dying a slow death in Spain — Catalonia has effectively banned the sport — whereas in France, the corrida is alive and, if not exactly charging ahead, standing on its hooves.

Indeed, the country is set to become the bullfighting centre of the globe: an estimated 1,000 bulls per year are killed in French arenas. According to the pro-bullfight organisation, the Observatoire National des Cultures Taurines (ONCT), two million people attend corridas in France each year. As any of these French aficionados will tell you, likely at great length, the Gallic spectator is more demanding than the Spaniard, preferring slow, classical cape-work above theatrical stabbing. Olé!

The French fancy for bullfighting is at odds with the country’s penal code, which under article 521-1 bans “cruel acts and serious ill-treatment towards animals”. But this is a nation where patrimoine, heritage, is always the trump card. Thus, the penal code allows exceptions for bullfights — as it does for cockfights — where there is “uninterrupted local tradition”. After a presentation by the ONCT, the Ministry of Culture registered bullfighting as a French Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2011. Last November, the French parliament, dominated by Macron’s LREM, voted to end the use of wild animals in live circus shows, and outlawed mink farming, in new animal rights legislation. But it flunked a ban on bullfighting.

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As you would expect — might even hope — bullfighting is a red rag to animal rights activists. The Society for the Protection of Animals (SPA) has filed cases in cities where bullfighting is popular, including Bayonne — so far without success. Each and every time, “uninterrupted local tradition” beats the cruelty to animals argument. Exactly what constitutes “uninterrupted” is a pay-day for lawyers; bullfighting in the Gironde, the Bordeaux department, exists largely because of a campaign in the Eighties by aficionado Claude Mounic, who persuaded a Bordeaux court that a hiatus of 26 years in the sport was caused by the collapse of a stadium, meaning the sport remains “uninterrupted”: “interruption cannot result from a material and fortuitous fact”. This overturned a previous decision by the Bordeaux tribunal that bullfighting locally had ceased to exist. Mounic went to court some ten times to restore the sport in the Gironde.

The arena concerned was in the suburb of Le Bouscat, and held 10,500 spectators. It was so decrepit that it was bulldozed to make way for a residential complex. Today the local venue is at La Brède, which is one of the 50 or so towns organised in L’Union des villes taurines françaises. Created in 1966, the UVTF, was a key lobbyist behind the registration of bullfighting as a French Intangible Cultural Heritage.

French supporters of bullfighting cite heritage, art and biodiversity (bulls bred for the ring are raised outdoors, since rusticity gives the bulls “a savagery essential to their behaviour in the arena”, according to the ONCT). Then they cite heritage, again.

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In southern France, from the Camargue westwards, tauromachie is part of the fabric of life. You can sit in a café and hear people discussing bovine-bloodlines back to the Ark until you want to chuck them in the ring, and feed them to the bulls. Much as The Times might publish details of  horse racing, Sud-Ouest (250,000 copies sold daily), publishes details of the of bullfights across south France and northern Spain. French fans, generally more monied than their Spanish counterparts, travel for tauromachie.

But the patrimoine argument is, well, bullshit: the corrida form of bullfighting, where the creature is provoked and killed with swords, was imported in the mid-19th century from Spain, where the “sport” had begun in Seville abattoirs. For the south of France, with its self-conscious “Espirit du Sud”, the Spanish-style corrida represented resistance to Parisian centralism. It still does. The current corrida’s self-conscious Hispanophilia, and use of Spanish lingo, is two fingers to rule by the Elysee palace. The South likes to lock horns with the Court. Ask the Cathars. Or indeed the French Revolutionary troops for whom the “Marseillaise” is named.

Bullfighting is a trans-Pyrennean business; bulls raised in the Landes and the Camargue — there are some 40 members of the Association des éleveurs français de taureaux de combat — are transported to Spanish rings (a good bull will earn its owner €3000 for its 15 minutes of fame in a corrida). Meanwhile the matadors appearing in French rings are largely Hispanic. No French matador entered the top ten rankings until Sébastien Castella in 2005.

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Anyone writing on bullfighting needs to declare their skin in the game. I might raise livestock and sometimes shoot animals for the pot, but I don’t drown kittens in a sack or pull the legs off spiders for a larf. I am not a natural born bullfight spectator. Any iota of sympathy I personally had for the corrida began to fade when I first saw a pike stuck into a bull’s back; the more the bull leaked blood, the more my desire to watch the “spectacle” bled out. All the learned discourses about the bravura of the bulls, the grace of the matador, and what 41 celebrity defenders recently termed “an art, culminating in the meeting of courage and honour” were rendered to rubbish, as the bloodied body of the bull was dragged from the arena. When I think of my experience of the corrida, I hear the famous anti-bullfighting song, La Corrida , by French balladeer Francis Cabrel. Written from the bull’s point of view, the chorus runs: Est-ce que ce monde est sérieux?

Is this world serious? In the 21st century, a highly sentient creature is provocatively stabbed, then slaughtered for amusement. The Spanish-style bullfight is bull-baiting, pure and simple — a re-warmed Roman circus for the masses — and cannot last. According to a survey carried out by the independent polling company IFOP for Fondation Brigitte Bardot 74% of the French are in favour of a ban on French bullfights which end in the bull being killed.

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It is fortunate, then, that French tauromachie originally had non-violent roots. In the “Course Landaise”, the matador leaps acrobatically over and around the snorter; in the “Course Camarguaise”, men and women race about, trying to grab ribbons and pompoms from the beasts’ horns. Angry but at least alive, the bull is put out to grass afterwards. According to the Anti-bullfighting Alliance, 76% of French people wish to replace bullfights with the Camargue and Landes alternatives. I can’t say that any taunting of an animal constitutes sport in my book, but ten out of ten bulls consulted prefer the non-deadly bullfight.

If your taste runs to it, there is no shortage of Course Landaise and Course Carmaguaise events this summer in Southern France — and they at least have the merit of being thoroughly, properly French. Such bullfights are often the centre of festivities which draw thousands onto the streets. Everywhere, the right red stuff flows freely. Wine. Not bull’s blood.