‘We bought a French vineyard – it took us seven years to turn a profit'

Telegraph

3 days ago

David Moore is starting his tractor with a screwdriver. 'There's a problem with the old girl's ignition,' he says. 'It's alright though, I saw this done on Ozark.'
In the 15 years since David, 58, and his wife Amanda, 57, packed up three cats, two horses, two young daughters and a dog to start a new life in Bordeaux, they've often had to improvise.
The decrepit farmhouse and 10-hectare vineyard they bought for €370,000 (£320,000) in 2010 has needed years of hard graft, relentless optimism and cash to transform into the wine business it is today. They are still using much of the ancient, rusted machinery they bought from the previous owner.
'The house was a complete and utter wreck,' Amanda says. 'There was a bird's nest in the hall, and a macerating toilet behind a screen in the corner. Frogs would get in at night and wake the kids up.'
It's the kind of rustic blank slate that creeps into the daydreams of sun-starved wine-lovers sitting in their home offices in the suburbs.
David and Amanda, from Harrogate in North Yorkshire, are among the tiny minority to have turned the hazy idea into reality.
Their farmhouse is now a chicly furnished four-bedroom home with elegant oak beams and exposed limestone brickwork. They serve their wine to tourists in a renovated, high-ceilinged barn where paintings created by their daughter, an art student at the nearby University of Bordeaux, hang on the walls.
But becoming winemakers – or vignerons – was always going to be a financial gamble.
'We were really into wine – drinking it,' David says. 'We knew you could get three bottles for a tenner at Morrisons but we knew nothing on the side of viticulture.
'We had no idea how expensive it would be to farm grapes and make wine, let alone renovate the house and other buildings.'
The couple have ploughed around €250,000 (£217,000) into works on the property and vineyard, reinvesting most of their revenue back into the business.
Now they are grappling with a crisis engulfing France's wine industry. Production costs are ratcheting up while domestic and international demand has slumped. Cellars from Champagne to Provence are full of surplus stock.
The backdrop is a changing climate, making the weather more extreme and altering the character of vintages from the country's renowned wine-growing regions.
'We didn't have a plan'
Harsh economic conditions mean intrepid foreigners like David and Amanda are becoming harder to find in France.
Gilles Martin, of Vinea Transaction, an estate agency specialising in French vineyard sales, says the number of British buyers has collapsed since the heyday 20 years ago.
'Between 2000 and 2010 we would sell dozens of vineyards to British buyers. They represented around a third of all our sales. Last year we sold just three, and the share was down to 5pc.'
The financial crisis put an end to the boom. The pound plummeted against the euro, making French vineyards relatively more expensive. Brexit would later add an extra layer of bureaucracy for anyone tempted to take the plunge.
David and Amanda first started to think about moving to France in 2007 after David bought himself a tractor for his 40th birthday.
'It was a sort of midlife crisis,' he says with a smile. 'We were living in a beautiful house with some land. But ever since the two of us met, we had an itch to do something different.'
Back then, a pound was worth €1.50. By the time they came to sign for the vineyard three years later, the pound was approaching parity with the euro, and the cost of fulfilling their dream had risen sharply.
Even so, the vineyard purchase was covered by the sale of their Yorkshire home, leaving them with a modest cushion of around £40,000. They used the money to renovate the farmhouse, buy and repair the rusty machinery, and fund their lives while they worked to get the neglected vineyard into shape. They christened their new business 'The Naked Vigneron'.
David, a painter and decorator, did odd jobs on the side to help keep the family afloat in the 18 months before they sold their first bottle. Having only 'schoolboy French' and two daughters aged four and five didn't make things any easier.
'We didn't have a plan,' David adds. 'We didn't sit down and do a spreadsheet. We knew it wouldn't be easy but we were a little naive about the financial side of things.'
Their limited funds meant they decided to tend the vines, pick the grapes and make the wine themselves, without any professional help. David did all of the building work himself, meaning they only paid for the raw materials.
They discovered that the combination of climate and soil in their corner of eastern Bordeaux, just 200m from the Dordogne border, produced chalky, full-bodied reds.
But it took until 2017, seven years after starting the business, to turn a profit for the first time.
Like all French winemakers, the couple have had to contend with an increasingly unpredictable climate. Their first profitable year coincided with the vineyard's first major disaster, when a frost wiped out 95pc of the harvest.
In the eight years since, David and Amanda have had six 'dire' harvests, either frost or mildew, when evaporating rainwater rots the grapes.
Forced to diversify
In the couple's stone-walled winery, a bat flits between gnarled beams and disappears into the rafters. Six dusty bottles of the vineyard's early produce sit on a surface near a cast iron wine press. The battered wooden door is encrusted with snails.
'If we'd had a million, we'd have refurbished this place,' Amanda says. 'But we've grown to like working with the old gear. People who visit appreciate the rustic.'
David leans on a large burgundy-coloured storage vat with white numbers scratched on to it. 'In a normal, good harvest year, we would produce 25,000 litres of red,' he says. 'Last year this was down to 1,200 litres.'
In the early years, they sold a lot of wine in bulk (' en vrac ') to a négociant – a middleman who would mix their raw product with other wines and sell on the resulting blend.
These sales were the 'bread and butter' of the business, raking in as much as €42,000 a year – helped by the fact their wine was organic and commanded a premium.
The pandemic put an end to this lucrative source of revenue. Tourists stayed away, demand slumped and the wholesale market never recovered.
This new reality forced them to diversify. Most of the business's income now comes from tastings, tours and meals rather than bulk wine sales.
They have hosted a handful of weddings in the beautifully restored barn, and are planning to eventually rent out the whole property and grounds for big functions. They even sell organic waste, like seeds, and tiny quantities of wine, to cosmetics firms to add to perfumes.
Three quarters of the wine they sell is to fellow Brits. 'We've ended up moving to a very Anglicised area,' Amanda says. 'All our nearest neighbours are British.'
In a good year, the business just about reaches the €60,000 of turnover needed to break even.
British winemakers selling up
The Naked Vigneron is among thousands of French wineries facing an uncertain future.
Domestic wine consumption has collapsed from 120 litres per adult annually in the 1960s to just 40 litres today, as younger generations switch to whisky and beer. International competition and waning demand from previously big importers like China have also dented demand.
In a bid to cut the amount of wine flooding the market, the French government is offering winemakers €6,000 per hectare to dig up their vines and not replant them until at least 2029.
David and Amanda took up the offer this year, uprooting six of their 10 hectares of vines in exchange for €36,000. David did the digging himself to save money.
Other weary producers are simply calling it quits. Martin, of Vinea Transactions, has seen a rise in the number of British winemakers selling up in the last five years.
'In Bordeaux, in particular, there are no English buyers and the market is very down, it's very difficult,' he says. 'Some are approaching retirement age and their children are not interested in wine. Market conditions are also bad.'
Martin's clients are a mix of professional winemakers and enthusiastic amateurs looking for an idyllic plot at a reasonable price.
The vineyards he sells begin at around the €1m mark, rising to €20m in the prime appellations like the Loire, Languedoc and the Rhône Valley. But the wine crisis means some are selling at a hefty discount.
'There's a readjustment in the market. We have to explain to sellers that they will have to take a lower price.'
David and Amanda know three English couples who have sold up their French vineyards in the last few years. But the pair are determined to tough it out.
'We've never thought about throwing in the towel,' Amanda says. 'We love it here. Our kids hate the idea of us selling it.'
David looks across from a row of vines to a pale-stoned building plonked in the middle of an empty field. There are no windows and part of the tiled roof has caved in.
Their plan, he says, is to turn the ruin into a gîte with three bedrooms and a swimming pool – the latest venture to boost the vineyard's income.
David estimates the refurbishment will cost €50,000, including a new roof, and installing electricity and running water. They hope to fund some of the building work with the government grant.
It is ambitious given the economic climate and the hard labour required. But after years of defying the odds, David looks at the ruin and sees another opportunity.
'We're not a million miles away from 60 and it's not going to get much easier physically – but there's still a lot more we want to do,' he says.
'There's nothing like a bit of a struggle here and there. You wouldn't want it on a plate.
'Doing it all ourselves is very satisfying. Sometimes we sit here and pinch ourselves and look around and think: we made this.'
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