It's tough to do something you believe is important. Ask the winemaker who's up at 5am to start harvest by hand, because he won't compact the soil with a tractor, and by midday it's too hot to pick at all. Or ask any of the independent growers we work with, who've just come through one of the hardest seasons in living memory.
Pour — France's smallest harvest since 1957
Here's the number behind that: France's 2026 harvest is forecast to come in below 34 million hectolitres. That's the smallest French wine harvest since 1957 — nearly 70 years — and a 6% drop on 2025. The causes, according to France's own Ministry of Agriculture, are straightforward and brutal: severe drought, repeated heatwaves, hailstorms, and a shrinking area of vines under cultivation. (Connexion France)
What the headline number hides is how unevenly it landed. Champagne is down 48% on its five-year average. Burgundy and Beaujolais — where our own Anne of Domaine Lachat farms — are down a third. Jura is down 36%. The Loire got off comparatively lightly at -12%. Meanwhile Bordeaux is actually up 10%, helped by late rain, and Languedoc-Roussillon is up 5%.
That unevenness is the whole point of this piece. A big commercial blend can smooth all of that away — buy in from wherever had a decent year, keep the label looking the same, keep the price the same. A small, independent winemaker farming one plot in one region can't do that. If their region got hit, they got hit, full stop. There's no blending it out.
When yields crash like this, the independents feel it first — before it ever shows up on a supermarket shelf. This is exactly why knowing your winemaker matters more this year, not less. When you buy direct, you can actually ask what happened in the vineyard — and get a real answer, not a marketing line. We're still confirming with a couple of our own growers exactly how their 2026 numbers landed, including the one doing the 5am hand-harvest mentioned above; we'll update this once we have the specifics from them directly, rather than guess.
Grow — who actually pays for cheap wine?
None of this is really about wine. It's about what happens when we treat food and drink as a commodity to be bought as cheaply as possible, rather than something grown by a person, on a specific piece of land, in a specific year.
Linda Johnson-Bell put this better than we could, in a clip from her Beyond Organic Wine podcast with Adam Huss:
"We have one grower who pays the true cost of protecting the soil and the water, and then you have another one who achieves more volume using practices whose environmental costs are paid later, or by somebody else. But both wines have to enter the same price negotiation. So it's not a free market, it's a market in which some costs have been hidden and are being carried by the wrong people. […] We can't build a sustainable wine industry by asking growers to behave ethically in a market that rewards them for doing the opposite."
Listen: Real Wine vs. Most Wine (podcast) →
Cheaper wine has a cost that just doesn't show up on the price tag: more industrial farming, more synthetic inputs, more of the emissions and soil degradation that make seasons like this one more frequent, not less. We're not saying everyone should buy more expensive wine — if you can't stretch to it right now, don't. But if you can manage even one case a year from an independent, regenerative or organic grower, it goes further than it looks like it would.
Thrive — how people are actually drinking and buying now
New IWSR purchase data is pushing back on the viral "Gen Z is quitting alcohol" narrative — the real picture looks less like drinking less, and more like drinking better.
And in Napa, one winery just ditched its traditional wine club for a subscription model, as buying habits shift. We never needed to reinvent ours: skipping the middleman was the model from day one.
That's the whole reason Vivan exists: a direct line between you and the people actually growing the wine, season by season, including the seasons that go badly. No importers, no distributors, no markup layered on by people who never set foot in the vineyard.
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