The Summer That Scorched French Grapes, English Gardens—and Europe’s Economy

BORDEAUX, France—For 700 years, Château Carbonnieux relied on rainwater to nourish its grapes, a tradition that preserved the vineyard’s connection to the local terroir.

Then temperatures rose to a record-breaking 108 degrees Fahrenheit in June, and co-owner Philibert Perrin noticed the leaves of his Cabernet Sauvignon grapes turning yellow and shriveling, an ominous sign. So he did the unthinkable: He sent a tractor rigged with a water tank and hoses into the vineyard to hydrate his most vulnerable vines.

“For the young vines we had to do it because they won’t survive the whole summer,” Perrin said. “At some point you see the plant suffering, and you’ve got to do something.”

Europe has just endured a summer for the ages. A series of punishing heat waves shattered temperature records. Wildfires turbocharged by the heat and lack of rain decimated France and Spain and popped up in unlikely places like Wales. Rivers across central Europe nearly ran dry. England’s rolling green hills and city parks were baked brown. Crops withered, riverboats ran aground, trains derailed.

The continent was already the fastest warming on the planet, with temperatures around 2.5 degrees Celsius warmer than in the preindustrial era, compared with around 1.4 degrees for the Earth as a whole. Ironically, one reason the region may be warming more quickly is its success in reducing air pollution, thinning the blanket of aerosols that bounce back solar radiation.

This summer took things to a new level.

It was the hottest June-to-July period on record in Western Europe, according to Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth observation program. July’s 6.5 millimeters of rain in England, about 0.25 inches, was the lowest since records began in 1836 and less than half the next driest July—in 1911. Levels of soil moisture across the Iberian Peninsula, France, Germany, Austria and Hungary were the lowest in a data set going back to 1979, hitting harvests. Four of Europe’s most famous rivers—the Loire, Danube, Rhine and Po—all hit record lows in August.

The scorching summer offered a sneak peek of what’s in store elsewhere, including in the U.S., as carbon emissions continue and temperatures climb in the years and decades to come. The pace of change has caught many European governments off guard, despite years of warnings from scientists.

“You think it’s an error in the data, but it’s not,” said Guido Cioni, a weather-data expert who works for Airbus.

The shifting climate will transform business as usual for governments, companies, farmers and ordinary people.

Europe has long enjoyed relatively mild weather, making things like air conditioning a luxury. Rain was relatively steady, allowing agriculture to be far less reliant on irrigation, especially in central and northern Europe.

That’s now changing, and it’s changing fast.

The U.K. had never recorded a temperature of 38 degrees Celsius, or about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, before 2003. It’s now done so six times, including twice this summer. The summer also doubled the previous record number of days above 34 degrees Celsius, or 93 Fahrenheit—14 versus seven in 1976, the year of a notorious heat wave. Before 1975, the U.K. had hit 34 degrees once or twice a decade on average, according to government data.

And it’s all being experienced with little to no air conditioning, from schools to subways to hospitals to homes, making daily life a sweltering burden.

Factories cut back production and businesses closed. Schools across England and France sent students home when temperatures spiked, and officials in England are now considering changing the calendar to end classes weeks earlier. Many wealthy southern Europeans are getting ahead of the changes by moving to cooler locations such as the higher-altitude landscapes in northern Spain.

Some make the case that a warmer climate should be seen as a win—a chance for the sun-starved British and northern Europeans to enjoy clear skies and hot weather, and a tourism opportunity for cooler spots like Scotland and Norway.

“Let’s celebrate some of these things, rather than just be sort of doom and gloom about it,” said Richard Tice, deputy leader of the Reform UK party, which opposes the government’s drive to lower carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.

Tice said warmer weather has upsides: Britain’s sparkling wine would soon challenge French Champagne.

Three in four Britons, though, are worried about climate change, according to a recent survey by pollster Ipsos. Some said they hadn’t been worried before this summer.

And farmers are in no mood to break out the bubbly. Three-quarters of England is in drought, the third in five years. Britain’s harvest may be the smallest on record, driving up already high food prices, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a U.K. nonprofit. Vegetables are stunted. Milk production is down because the cows are stressed and grass isn’t growing fast enough for them to feed, forcing farmers to dip into winter feed.

“We’ve never known anything like it,” said Tim O’Malley, chairman of Nationwide Produce, which grows vegetables across a thousand acres in East Anglia.

In July, just 2 millimeters of rain fell in East Anglia, drying out fields and shriveling vegetables in one of the U.K.’s breadbaskets.

“Combine 2 millimeters of rain with 35 degrees Centigrade—it’s bonkers,” O’Malley said.

​He expects shrinkflation as vegetables get smaller but prices don’t. Normally, O’Malley said, retailers buy iceberg lettuce in boxes of 12, each head weighing at least 400 grams, a little under a pound. This year, he’s heard of buyers cutting that to 250 grams, “not much bigger than a fist.”

His company has been importing vegetables from Europe in August—usually a time when the U.K. is overflowing with homegrown produce. But Spain and France have also been hit by heat waves that hurt harvests, and the Strait of Hormuz crisis has caused fertilizer costs to spiral.

Like many winemakers around Bordeaux, Perrin of Château Carbonnieux never installed an irrigation system. He never needed it thanks to the mild summer climate, with its cool evenings and occasional rain showers.

In mid-May, however, Bordeaux went bone dry. A succession of heat waves pummeled the area. Perrin and 11 other winemakers in the Pessac-Léognan appellation had to receive special permission to water their vines from France’s winemaking authority, which sent inspectors to ensure the plants were sufficiently distressed.

Perrin then assembled a makeshift watering squad—one person to drive the tractor and four others to trail with hoses—at a cost of about €1,500, or $1,750, a day. They targeted parcels of vineyard that represent its future: vines aged 4 to 8, old enough to bear fruit but too weak to endure the heat. Older vines, with deeper roots, were left to the elements.

The water saved the young vines, but the heat ripened the château’s grapes faster, forcing Perrin to start harvesting in early August, three weeks early.

Daniel Barbou, an 84-year-old grape picker, joined a small army of laborers in the scramble to harvest. For many grapes, it was already too late. Entire bunches had their skin scorched. Others had been reduced to raisins.

“It’s the first time in my 23 years of doing this that I’ve seen it like this,” Barbou said.

Perrin estimates the heat will cut white-grape production by a third and red grapes by half.

The record heat will eventually add 1-2 percentage points to food inflation and knock 0.2 percentage points or so off euro-area GDP growth in the third quarter, according to Tomas Dvorak, an economist at Oxford Economics. In a region where growth has been anemic, “this might be enough to make the economy stagnate,” even if it’s unlikely to cause a recession, he said.

While farmers will feel the most pain, the biggest hit on overall growth is likely to come from low water levels in the Rhine disrupting the flow of goods to and from Germany’s manufacturing companies, Dvorak said. That has cascading ramifications for their suppliers and customers across economies such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The combination of heat waves, drought and wildfires is expected to cost France, the EU’s second largest economy, up to €15 billion, or 0.5% of GDP, according to French Environment Minister Monique Barbut. That leaves the country’s public finances in an even deeper hole as the government prepares for end-of-year budget negotiations, which have felled previous administrations.

Longer term, a hotter climate will mean falling worker productivity. Each degree hotter between 30 and 35 Celsius lowers worker productivity by 3%, says German insurer Allianz. If the five hottest years of the past decade are repeated in the next five years, vulnerable countries like France could see a cumulative GDP hit of 5% to 7% by 2030, some $240 billion, it estimates.

While Europe has slashed carbon emissions, many experts say governments have been slow to focus on adaptation, including how to protect an elderly population without access to air conditioning from dying in droves during hot summer months. Leaders must scramble to retrofit workplaces like hospitals and schools with air conditioning, support farmers switching crops, and build out irrigation systems and water reservoirs.

The U.K. hasn’t built a major new water reservoir since 1992, even as its population has grown by 12 million people. Now, it lacks water at a time of soaring demand from consumers and new industries like data centers.

English summers are increasingly marked by a once rare ritual: water companies imposing monthslong bans on the use of garden hoses, leaving a nation of gardeners to hand-water their gardens or watch their plants die. One water company said its ban will last the rest of the year, no matter how much it rains.

Over his 40-year career in horticulture, Tim Upson has seen climate change firsthand, including over the past decade in the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens in Wisley, Surrey, a sprawling 240-acre area with more than 25,000 distinct types of plants and trees.

A few decades ago, he noticed spring arriving a few days or weeks early. Now, it’s often six or seven weeks early. “It’s frightening,” said Upson, the RHS head of gardens.

Plants that are a staple of English gardens—water-loving hydrangeas, rhododendrons, azaleas—will be harder and harder to maintain in southern England and become less common, he said. Dogwoods and cherry trees, which have shallow roots, will struggle.

Landscapes will also be altered as the climate of many American and European cities comes to resemble cities hundreds of miles south. In 60 years, New York City will feel like Ola, Ark., according to the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science. London will feel like Bordeaux.

Already this year, thousands of white spruce trees in the area around Wisley had browned leaves in early August, a sign they won’t cope with a hotter climate. The same goes for beech trees and oaks. Upson expects the species to slowly migrate further north or to valley bottoms, in search of water. The lifespan of England’s quintessential oaks, meanwhile, could dramatically shorten to 100-150 years in hotter weather compared with the current 400 years or more.

To plan for the shift, the RHS at Wisley is cataloging an estimated 400,000 varieties of plants and trees in the U.K. to help identify which will thrive in a hotter climate, one with prolonged droughts but also greater chances of flooding from wetter winters.

“It’s not simply about bringing in tropical or Mediterranean plants to English gardens, because we’ll still have cold winters,” said Alistair Griffiths, the RHS director of science.

Instead the RHS is considering trees that enjoy hotter and wetter weather, like the American river birch or crepe myrtle, or plants with deeper roots to tolerate drought like yarrow or bird’s foot. The plants and trees will also need to work well for pollinators, capture carbon and, of course, be nice to look at.

Griffiths walked Wisley’s gardens on a recent hot and sunny day. It hadn’t rained for 61 consecutive days—beating the previous record of 36 days set in 1976. He pointed to one of his favorite trees, a Japanese katsura, that smells like cotton candy when its leaves begin to fall in autumn. The scent already lingered in the air in mid-August.

“I fell in love with this tree. I planted one in my garden,” Griffiths said. “It’s not going to survive going forward.”

Moving on to a thriving Mediterranean-style garden, he noted it was important to stay optimistic: “Some plants will die, but others will thrive.”

In southwestern France, the hurdles to adaptation are formidable. The coastline is lined with maritime pines, originally planted under Napoleon III to shield local villages from advancing dunes. With their deep roots, the trees thrived in the sandy soil, becoming Europe’s largest artificial forest and a key driver of the area’s economy.

This summer, a combination of dry air, strong winds and dry vegetation turned the area into a “little bomb,” said Jean Jacques Maurin, a local tree farmer.

In late July, a brush-clearing operation ignited a fire that burned more than 100,000 acres, forcing 224,000 people to evacuate, including from the oceanside resort of Cap Ferret.

“We are practically wiped off the map,” said Ludivine Daurignac, whose home was one of more than 180 that burned down in the nearby village of Le Porge.

Around 10 million trees burned in the fire, the equivalent of an entire year’s harvest, according to Bruno Lafon, president of DFCI Aquitaine, an association of local forest owners.

Weaning the region off the highly flammable trees, Lafon said, is difficult because local industry is structured around the pine, with 60,000 jobs and €10 billion in annual revenue. “If we do something else, the factories will leave,” Lafon says.

The French government, which doesn’t have much fiscal slack, has pledged €12 million in immediate aid to the region, support that could rise to as much as €100 million once tax breaks and other measures kick in.

Maurin didn’t have insurance for his pines, having tried to hedge his risk over the years by purchasing plots in different parts of the forest. He figured that no fire could grow large enough to cover that distance.

Maurin saw 80% of his pines burn. The earliest he can replant is 2029, he said, to ensure parasites from the burned wood don’t affect his saplings.

Because the trees take up to 50 years to reach maturity, he considered them a generational investment, one that the 60-year-old had planned to pass down to his daughter.

Now Maurin walks among blackened tree trunks. Dead pine needles and soot carpet the forest floor.

“I would have preferred that my house burn instead of my forest,” he said.