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.

Photo by Idriss Bigou-Gilles

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