We don't say this lightly: 2026 has been the hardest growing season Vivan's winemakers have faced since we launched.
Three months in, the weather turned on almost everyone we work with, in almost every direction it's possible for weather to turn.
What actually happened
Hailstones the size of tennis balls tore through vineyards in the northeast, wrecking vines, tractors, and windscreens.
Further south and west, a three-month heatwave and drought scorched the rest, pushing vines into stress they were never built to survive. And wildfires — from the north of Scotland to the south of Italy — burned an area the size of Cornwall in France alone: kilometres of vines, olive groves, and homes gone.
Remi, one of our winemakers near Bordeaux, is currently hosting a family of four who lost their house in the fires.
This isn't a story happening somewhere abstract, to people we've never met. These are the winemakers whose wine is already on your table. People whose vineyards we've walked. Some of them have lost this year's crop outright. Some don't yet know what they've lost, because the harvest that will tell them is only just starting, weeks early, on land that's already been through more than any single season should ask of it.
Working through weather like this takes a real physical toll on the people doing it, and they're the same people deciding, grape by grape, whether there's anything left worth bringing in. Vignerons Engagés tracks the health impact of extreme heat on wine professionals directly, if you want the fuller picture beyond what we've seen first-hand.
Why this isn't easy to write
We don't want to overstate this into something tidier than it is. Nobody's crop damage undoes itself because the story gets told well. Nobody's house comes back because a newsletter goes out. We're not writing this to make anyone feel better about it, ourselves included.
What actually helps
Vivan exists to put growers first, not to sit between them and the people who drink their wine. Roughly 80% of what you spend on a case reaches the winemaker directly, no importer or distributor taking a cut in between. In a year like this, that's not an abstraction — it's income a grower needs now, arriving faster and more directly than it would through almost any other route to market.
If you've been meaning to order a case, doing it this month genuinely reaches the people this piece is about, quickly, and without a middleman between you and them. That's the honest version of what buying from Vivan does right now. We're not going to dress it up as more than that, and we're not going to pretend it isn't real.
Where things stand now
Harvest is already underway for some of the growers hit hardest this year. What's left to bring in will show, more clearly than any report could, what actually survived the season.
We'll keep you posted on how it goes, and on how Remi's family, and the others affected, are doing as the year moves on.
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