Climate Change Leads Some Bordeaux Wine Producers to Plant Olives

In the south­west­ern French depart­ment of Gironde, olive grow­ers, pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tions and local insti­tu­tions are explor­ing poten­tial olive farm­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties in the region.

While Gironde, espe­cially Bordeaux, is glob­ally renowned for its vine­yards and wine pro­duc­tion, some grow­ers are begin­ning to plant olive trees. The new groves have mostly been the ini­tia­tive of wine pro­duc­ers and south­ern French farm­ers mov­ing to the region.

According to France Olive, a pro­ducer asso­ci­a­tion, cli­mate change has turned Gironde into an inter­est­ing place to exper­i­ment with olive grow­ing and oil pro­duc­tion.

“Here, just as else­where, we have been wit­ness­ing tra­di­tional south­ern cul­ti­va­tion going north, and the olive tree is no excep­tion to this rule,” Hélène Lasserre, the direc­tor of con­ser­va­tion and research at France Olive, told Olive Oil Times.

“Olive cul­ti­va­tion used to stop at the edge of Carcassonne, the medieval city north of Narbonne,” she added. ​“In the last 18 years, ran­dom projects have qui­etly emerged in the Toulouse region, and now they have spread close to Bordeaux. The olive tree, if it does not freeze, seems to sus­tain the cli­mate from a phys­i­o­log­i­cal point of view.”

Gironde typ­i­cally fea­tures a tem­per­ate cli­mate. Temperatures rarely fall below freez­ing, and the region expe­ri­ences rel­a­tively cool sum­mers, with the warmest months sel­dom exceed­ing 30 ºC. Gironde is also mod­er­ately wet, with up to 355 mil­lime­ters of pre­cip­i­ta­tion annu­ally.

In 2018, Bernard and Françoise Saïn retired from their pre­vi­ous farm­ing activ­i­ties in south­ern France and decided to move to Aillas, not far from Bordeaux, where they planted a few hectares of olive trees.

In the fol­low­ing three years, they planted more than 600 Picholine, Aglandau, Cayon and Bouteillan trees.

According to local media reports, the cou­ple started to build an olive mill to pro­duce oil from their annual har­vest. Other local farm­ers are con­sid­er­ing fol­low­ing the same path.

Some of the new olive groves of the region come from the ini­tia­tive of wine pro­duc­ers who are strug­gling with the impacts of cli­mate change on the wine sec­tor. For them, olive trees are seen as a way to diver­sify.

“There’s a wine cri­sis in the Bordeaux region among small wine pro­duc­ers who are faced with an uncer­tain cash flow and unsold wine stocks,” Lasserre said.

“This mostly con­cerns the south­ern por­tion of the Bordeaux region, not the Médoc nor its grand crus,” she added. ​“Given this sce­nario, many are start­ing to tear down the vine­yard and are look­ing for alter­na­tives and new agri­cul­tural prod­ucts.”

“The olive tree could be a solu­tion for them as well as the almond tree and kiwi,” Lasserre con­tin­ued, adding how an esti­mated 15 per­cent of the vine­yards should be closed to keep the sec­tor afloat.

However, Lasserre acknowl­edged that the few olive grow­ers in the region face sev­eral chal­lenges, such as the lack of water man­age­ment infra­struc­ture in an area where irri­ga­tion for vine­yards does not exist.

“The prob­lem is water man­age­ment, avail­abil­ity and the right of use in an area where it has not been a pri­or­ity in land use plan­ning,” she said.

“We always think of Bordeaux as close to the ocean and, there­fore, a rather wet area, but this region is not spared by cli­mate change,” Lasserre added. ​“The cur­rent sea­son is an exam­ple of this. It was a year of drought for the region as it was else­where. Therefore, grow­ing olives with­out irri­ga­tion in this area is unthink­able if one looks to pro­duc­tion and prof­itabil­ity.”

During the meet­ing, Fabien Bougès, a local farmer, noted how it is impos­si­ble to know before­hand how the olive trees he planted in 2019 would fare.

“We planted 14 dif­fer­ent cul­ti­vars as a test to iden­tify which ones might be more suited for our region,” he said.

Bougès man­aged 34 hectares of vine­yards for a long time before diver­si­fy­ing as the wine cri­sis began to affect his farm. ​“We have to deal with cli­mate change and try to plant species that come from the south, which might be more resilient to drought and the hot weather,” he said.

Lasserre con­firmed the chal­lenges posed by the region’s lack of an olive-grow­ing his­tory. ​“It is not that we need to re-learn how to grow olives. Growers here have to learn how to from scratch,” she said.

“One tech­ni­cal prob­lem is that we do not know how the olive tree reacts to this oceanic cli­mate – wet in spring and autumn, mild in win­ter – which is con­ducive to the devel­op­ment of foliage dis­eases such as pea­cock eye and cer­cospo­riose,” Lasserre added.

“To me, the con­trol of this san­i­tary aspect is essen­tial for olive tree devel­op­ment and its pro­duc­tiv­ity, in short, for the suc­cess of olive grow­ing in Gironde,” she con­tin­ued. ​“That is because the inten­sity of the healthy foliage derives the well-being and pro­duc­tiv­ity of the tree.”

The lack of olive trans­for­ma­tion facil­i­ties in the region is another chal­lenge for local grow­ers cited by Lasserre.

Furthermore, it is prov­ing dif­fi­cult to con­vince wine pro­duc­ers to put in years of time and cap­i­tal to grow olive trees and build a mill when the poten­tial prof­itabil­ity remains unknown.

Still, Lasserre argued that com­bin­ing wine and olive farm­ing might bring some ben­e­fits in terms of fos­ter­ing bio­di­ver­sity, enrich­ing the land­scape and pro­tect­ing the envi­ron­ment, a prac­tice that has taken place in parts of France since the Middle Ages.

Currently, France pro­duces approx­i­mately 4 per­cent of the olive oil con­sumed in the coun­try, a fig­ure that has not changed sig­nif­i­cantly over the last 20 years.

France Olive noted that while pro­duc­tion vol­umes are low, about 5,000 tons per annum in good crop years, the value of olive oil is high. ​“Thirty per­cent of our groves are organic, and more than a quar­ter of those are Protected Designation of Origin cer­ti­fied,” Lasserre said.

In Gironde, the debate over the future of olive oil has started. ​“So far, apart from a few pio­neers who are very few, we are at a stage where we share thoughts [about this pos­si­ble devel­op­ment],” Lasserre said.

“That is why we had the meet­ing, to intro­duce those pio­neers to the French olive sec­tor and to the key facts to take into con­sid­er­a­tion while debat­ing about start­ing new olive groves,” she con­cluded.

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