How Bordeaux’s irrigation issue came to a head at Château Lafleur
What compelled one of Pomerol’s most celebrated wines to abandon its appellation?
With an average price of about £650 a bottle, Château Lafleur is one of the most expensive wines of Bordeaux. It’s produced from less than five hectares of Cabernet Franc and Merlot vines on the plateau of Pomerol just next to Petrus, the most expensive bordeaux of all.
Few announcements in the world of wine could cause such a stir as the one made by Lafleur’s owners, the Guinaudeau family, late last month on the eve of this year’s extraordinarily early harvest. They announced that, after nearly 90 years, they have decided to leave the warm embrace of the Pomerol appellation for the wild and woolly Vin de France category, one more readily associated with the sort of quirky wines you find in wine bars in eastern Paris.
From the 2025 vintage onwards, Ch Lafleur labels won’t give any precise indication of the wine’s geographical origins, nor suggest that Pomerol’s regulations have been obeyed. Instead, it will join the swelling but decidedly heterogeneous group of wines made by people who have decided to turn their backs on France’s beloved Appellation Contrôlée system.
The initial announcement, perhaps foolishly, provided no explanation and was rushed out just before the first Lafleur 2025 grapes were harvested. Social media went mad. Baptiste and Julie Guinaudeau had to turn off their phones on the first day of their Merlot harvest.
Despite having to work until midnight overseeing the reception of the first lot of Lafleur grapes from the exceptionally hot, dry summer of 2025, they realised they would have to issue a second statement. This time, it was a very detailed, three-page missive clarifying that their decision to exit the appellation was essentially driven by its ban on irrigation or, as they put it, not being allowed to practise “assisted, early soil recharge” with water.
Although irrigation is allowed and widely practised in most wine regions, in France it has long been outlawed for most Appellation Contrôlée wines, except for newly planted vines which need water to establish themselves. Historically, this has been because the authorities were worried that growers would use added water to swell the grapes, increasing yields and potentially diluting the quality of the wine.
Since 2006, French vignerons have been allowed to request special permission to irrigate in their appellation, though the process is convoluted. In Pessac-Léognan, where the sandy gravel retains little water, growers were permitted to irrigate in 2022 and 2025. The punishingly dry summer of 2022 finally compelled the Pomerol authorities to permit a derogation, but, issued in July, it came too late to save many of the vines from sunburn and the grapes from shrivelling to raisins. When temperatures reach 30C (86F), the vines’ stomata close, abruptly halting photosynthesis and therefore grape ripening, so the vine can concentrate its energy on survival. The resulting wines are typically high in tannin and low in flavour.
It was the heatwave vintage of 2003 that signalled a turning point for Baptiste, Julie, and Baptiste’s parents, Jacques and Sylvie Guinaudeau (and many other French vine growers). And that was only the start of these hotter, drier summers.
Since 2012, the Guinaudeaus have been monitoring humidity in their soil and their vines, learning to distinguish between heat stress and water stress and, defiantly, experimenting with adding water early in the growing season when it is most needed. They established a few small reservoirs, and in 2021 dug a 142m borehole to Bordeaux’s aquifer. After much trial and error, they also developed a tractor that can inject water 15cm below the surface and then restore the soil to minimise evaporation — an important consideration in these hot summers.
The Lafleur news is just sinking in for other Pomerol producers but Fiona Morrison, Master of Wine and wife of Jacques Thienpont, whose Le Pin Pomerol sells for almost as much as Petrus, was the first neighbour to congratulate them on their stance. Asked whether her husband might irrigate too, she texted that he is “considering it for the future but not ready to stick his neck out!”
Christian Moueix, who for many years ran Petrus, told me he had discussed irrigation at length with Baptiste Guinaudeau and added “his decision will force all of us to attack the problem without delay”. His son Edouard Moueix agreed: “We now have to make sure the general rules of the appellations evolve with the climate.”
Gavin Quinney’s property Ch Bauduc is 20 miles south-west of Pomerol in Bordeaux’s less glamorous Entre-Deux-Mers region, but he is a prolific reporter on the whole Bordeaux wine scene. He wrote to me: “My reaction over Lafleur was ‘good for them!’ At the very least it opens the debate about irrigation — not just to help the vines cope but to manage alcohol levels.”
For a Burgundian view, I asked Guillaume d’Angerville of Volnay, one of the region’s most thoughtful and respected wine producers. He is against using what he views as technological tools or devices, such as most anti-frost measures and anti-hail nets, to fight the vicissitudes of nature, preferring to encourage differentiation between vintages. “Will irrigation alter the character of the terroir, or of the wines produced from this terroir? Intuitively, I would say yes, as it will make the vines lazier since they would be provided with water that they would normally have to find by growing deeper.” But he does admit that summers are becoming hotter and drier. This year at Domaine Marquis d’Angerville, for instance, they most unusually started picking in August, as they did in 2020 and 2022.
He is keener on the supplementary measures adopted by the Guinaudeaus, such as training the vines lower so that there is less evaporation and encouraging more leaves on the vine to protect the grapes from heat stress and sunburn.
Professor Edmund C Penning-Rowsell, the son of my late predecessor as FT wine correspondent and an academic specialising in water, points out that it would not be easy to find sufficient sources of suitable irrigation water in either Bordeaux or Burgundy. In Bordeaux, the Gironde is too saline, and levels in the rivers leading into it have been falling steadily because of decreased snowfall on the Pyrenees. New reservoirs would have to be built and expensively lined to avoid leakage through the gravel below. The limestone that underlies the most famous vineyards of Burgundy presents the same sort of challenge, and in both regions land costs are high.
Even in those regions where irrigation is permitted, water is becoming increasingly scarce and expensive, not least in Australia, where some of the inland wine regions responsible for the country’s mass-market wine are on the verge of collapse because rivers are drying up. Meanwhile in California the new badge of honour among growers is to boast that their vines are “dry-farmed”. There’s a certain irony in this while their European counterparts move ever closer towards irrigation.
