After
the Fire
ON
A COLD, clear morning last October, 57-year-old
Sophie Guiraudon led me along a dusty track that
snaked up a hillside toward an old stone
sheepfold. On either side of the path, we were
surrounded by seemingly endless rows of charred
vines, which stood in stark contrast to the
beige and bone-white hues of the cracked earth
from which they grew. Or rather, had grown. As
she surveyed what was left of her 25-acre
estate, Guiraudon spoke of the wild beauty she
had once found in the rough terrain of this
rocky plateau, set above the medieval village of
Lagrasse in the heart of southwestern France’s
historic Corbières wine region. “But when I come
back here now, this landscape unsettles me,” she
said. “It upsets me physically.”
About
two months earlier, on August 5, a wildfire had
broken out just a couple hundred meters from
where we stood. Within 48 hours, it grew into a
conflagration that consumed 40,000 acres in the
department of Aude (an administrative unit
similar to a county that the Corbières region is
part of). That’s an area more than
one-and-a-half times the size of Paris. The fire
would go on to become the biggest blaze recorded
in France in almost 80 years. It would take 23
days, more than 2,000 firefighters, and the
French Civil Security Agency’s entire national
air fleet to put it out.
Guiraudon
lost almost everything. More than 90 percent of
the vines she had tended for 25 years to produce
refined organic wines were gone within the space
of an hour. The fire destroyed more than just
decades of hard work. Guiraudon’s children grew
up playing among these vines, helping their
mother pick grapes at harvest time. “It was as
if all my memories of this place had been taken
from me,” she said.
Guiraudon
had been in the process of selling her estate
when the fire hit. More than three years of
punishing drought and oppressive summer
heatwaves had taken a steep toll on the
vineyard. In 2024, her total production had more
than halved, dropping from about 6,500 to 8,000
gallons to just over 3,000. “I had the feeling
that things were only going to get worse, so I
said to myself, At least you’re going to get a
head start,” she said.
But
the fire denied her the chance to go out on her
own terms.
Guiraudon’s
story is not only emblematic of the wider impact
of the fire, which burned a total of more than
2,200 acres of vines in the Corbières, it also
exemplifies the increasingly existential threat
to an industry that has long been this region’s
lifeblood, and the uncertain future of the
region itself.
Journalist Christopher Clark
writes about how a devasting August 2025
wildfire in France’s historic Corbières wine
region has local vinters, farmers, and other
residents rethinking their relationship to the
land.
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