France experienced, in 2020, its second hottest spring for a hundred years. Enough to confuse the French vines, which will be ready for the harvest from mid-August in several regions, while the grape harvest usually takes place at the end of August-beginning of September.
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" The vineyards have a remarkable lead, for some up to a month compared to 2019, " says Agreste, the statistics service of the Ministry of Agriculture in a note. This advance, attributed to global warming, can paradoxically rejoice wine growers who anticipate a good harvest thanks to a sunny spring and heavy rains in June.
“ According to the first estimates established on August 1, 2020, the 2020 wine production would be in a range between 44.7 and 45.7 million hectoliters. The 2020 wine harvest would be 6 to 8% higher than that of 2019. Without being as high as that of 2018, it could return to the level of the harvest prior to 2017 ”, the year in which the winegrowers experienced a painful episode of destructive frost .
Important manpower requirements
These early harvests, which promise to be generous, are forcing producers to adapt the measures put in place to welcome seasonal workers, all the more so in this year marked by the coronavirus epidemic. Producers are indeed anticipating a lower yield because of the measures that will have to be taken to enforce barrier actions, such as creating circuits in the vineyard, for example.
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However, will these measures be sufficient to reassure seasonal workers? Each year, an average of 400,000 people are hired to participate in the harvest. Usually, a quarter of the seasonal workers hired for the harvest are foreigners. Travel restrictions have been lifted for seasonal workers, but for safety's sake, some winegrowers are tempted to turn more to a French, local workforce.
Pôle Emploi, which sees in this situation the opportunity for the unemployed to find work, has already set up its recruitment system for grape pickers in Alsace, with a special telephone line activated on Tuesday 11th August. " This year, with such a high unemployment rate, early harvests which should allow students to attend and a desire of people to taste this life in the open air, we will find many solutions ", hopes Christophe Pernet, president of the employers' delegation within the Syndicat Général des Vignerons de la Champagne, interviewed by France Inter. More than 170 seasonal job offers have been posted on the Pôle Emploi website in recent weeks.
After the harvest, the winegrowers will not be at the end of their troubles. " At this stage, uncertainties remain about the volumes that will be produced in PDO in certain basins, due to an economic market degraded by the Covid-19 crisis ", points out Agreste. In Champagne in particular, winegrowers and trading houses are tearing themselves apart over the question of the marketable yield of the next harvest. Faced with the plunge in sales linked to the Covid-19 epidemic and overstocking, houses want far fewer grapes than in 2019.
