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Vineyards in Côte de Beaune area have lost an estimated four million bottles, leaving many uninsured wine-makers in despair
Loïc de Roquefeuil surveyed what was left of his vineyard; row upon row of skeletal vines bereft of foliage and fruit, their snapped branches hanging limp.
"It's a catastrophe. Everything has gone: the leaves; the grapes; everything. It happened so quickly; a year's work gone in nine minutes of hail," he said.
He blinked back tears, crouching to examine the gnarled knuckle of a vine. "The storm was so violent the hailstones wounded the wood. The outer skin is shredded. There won't be a single bottle from these vines this year."
There will not be one euro from them either. The Bordeaux winemaker – the Vicomte de Roquefeuil to give his full title – stopped insuring against hail three years ago because it was "too expensive". He is not alone.
Local agriculture authorities estimate around 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) of Bordeaux vineyards were hit by a devastating storm last weekend, a large part uninsured. Around 7,000 hectares were entirely ravaged, including de Roquefeuil's 30 hectares at the Château de Castelneau near the village of Saint Léon, between the Dordogne and Garonne rivers south-east of Bordeaux.
Disaster struck the Bordeaux vineyards shortly after violent storms destroyed swaths of prime wine-producing land in Burgundy last month.
Wine-makers in the Côte de Beaune area, including the well-known Pommard, Volnay, Monthélie, Beaune and Mersault districts, had been struggling to recover from damage caused by hail last year and floods this spring, when they were hit again in July, costing the region an estimated 4m bottles. The storm last Friday night and early Saturday morning hit a slice of France from Bordeaux up to the Belgian border, including parts of Champagne.
The big name houses and Grands Crus of the Champagne and Bordeaux region were spared the worst of the devastation, but Bordeaux wine authorities say that while it is hard to estimate cost, the figure could be as high as €100m (£86m). They are urging the government to step in and help small, uninsured producers such as Roquefeuil, who have lost everything.
With no grapes to harvest and process, the loss of jobs and income to local communities – an estimated one employee for every five ravaged hectares – is a further, equally devastating blow.
Historic documents record evidence of wine-making in the Entre-deux-Mers as far back as 1244. Today, its 2,400 hectares of compacted sand, silt and clay soil yields 15m bottles a year, including the sweet whites of Cadillac and Loiupiac, and the dry Sainte-Foy and Graves de Vayres. Only the dry white wines qualify for the Entre-deux-Mers Appellation Controlée. The rest are labelled Bordeaux or Bordeaux Superior and since the mid 1900s white grapes have ceded to popular reds such as Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon.
De Roquefeuil and his wife Diane have run Château de Castelneau since 1988, slowing establishing a solid following of customers from China to Canada, as well as a sideline in gîtes and bed and breakfast accommodation. Their 2012 wines have received 12 medaille d'or for quality.
Diane has a photograph of the vines taken early on 2 August: they are lush in leaves and fruit. She clicked on a second shot taken at 20.56 the same day: a menacing iron-grey cloud with a trailing tornado plume fills the sky. A third picture at 21.25 shows what is left of the vines: denuded sticks.
"We have been hit by hail six times in the last 25 years, but never like this," Roquefeuil, the latest of nine generations of wine-makers, told the Guardian. "We'd just finished trimming the vines and getting rid of the weeds – without herbicides – ready for the harvest in September. They were perfect. We had high hopes of this harvest."
The hailstones shattered double-glazed windows, dislodged roof tiles and left a 40cm thick pile of ice stones "the size of pigeons' eggs" at the base of the chateau's medieval stone walls. It also cost De Roquefeuil 200,000 bottles of wine at a wholesale price of €3 each.
"It's a enormous loss," he said. "If we want to produce anything this year, we'll have to buy grapes from our neighbours, and that's going to be very expensive."
For drinkers, the effects are unlikely to be felt for a year or two – the time it would have taken for bottles to reach the shops – if felt at all.
Cécile Mathiaud of the Burgundy wine producers association (BIVB) says producers were reluctant to increase prices to cover their losses. "There's only so much you can pass on to the customer before they stop buying the wine and you lose them," Mathiaud said.
"Some wine-makers are talking about packing up and putting the key under the mat. It's horrible to be at the mercy of the weather and lose everything in minutes."
De Roquefeuil understands, but refuses to be crushed. As he talks, he shakes his head, rubs his eyes and runs his hands over his bald pate; wine is his life, his love.
"I have cried many times since the storm, but that's the emotion. Now the work begins. If needs be, I'll trim the vines with nail scissors to save something for next year," he says. "This life isn't one for the faint-hearted."
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