PARIS - Napoleon said he could not live without it. Brigitte Bardot once claimed in a commercial that it had “filled her life with bubbles,” while Serge Gainsbourg said Jacques Prévert drank a glass as early as 10 a.m. For centuries, Champagne has been woven into the fabric of French life. Now, climate change is putting that tradition under pressure. This year’s harvest was nearly halved, yet the grapes could produce an exceptional vintage.

The warning signs are stark. This summer’s grape harvest in Champagne, the eastern French region that gives the famed sparkling wine its name, was 48% smaller than last year, according to Agreste, the Agriculture Ministry’s Statistics Service. That is a far steeper decline than in the rest of the country, where production fell 6% overall, to less than 34 million hectoliters. Agreste called it “one of the smallest harvests of the past 30 years,” while noting wide disparities from one region to another.

The causes range from shrinking vineyard acreage to climate change. “We’ll end up with between 6,500 and 7,000 kilograms of grapes per hectare, whereas in past years we reached 10,000,” says Maxime Toubart, president of the General Syndicate of Champagne Winegrowers and co-president of Comité Champagne, which represents more than 16,000 growers and 350 Champagne wineries.

But climate change is affecting more than the quantity of grapes. It is also changing the quality of Champagne — and not necessarily for the worse.

Comité Champagne has described this year’s harvest as “exceptional,” with the “potential for great wines,” despite the poor yields. Spring frosts and subsequent heat waves this summer affected the quality of the grapes as well as the timing of the harvest, which took place 14 days earlier than in 2025. In some respects, the grapes “recall the great historic vintages of the 20th century, such as 1921, 1947 and 1959,” the industry group says.

The unusual conditions have also affected the grapes’ chemistry. The heat is pushing alcohol levels higher in the finished wine. As a result, France’s National Institute of Origin and Quality, or Inao, has temporarily authorized Champagne with an alcohol content above the usual 13% limit. Some bottles could reach 15%, although that increase is expected to affect only a few dozen producers.

“Champagne is a wine made by blending different vintages, and most producers will use previous vintages that don’t have these characteristics,” Toubart explains. Still, it is a new reality consumers may have to get used to - and not just this year, given the direction of climate conditions.

Perhaps such changes could help reverse a sales trend that has increasingly worried the vignerons working across the region’s 34,300 hectares of appellation vineyards. In 2025, 266 million bottles were sold - 152 million abroad and 114 million in France. That was a modest decline from the previous year’s 271 million bottles, but the drop looks far more dramatic compared with 2022, when the market exploded during the post-Covid boom, reaching 326 million bottles.

The trend is also being weighed down by tariffs imposed by Donald Trump. Exports to the United States are worth 800 million euros, according to Le Monde. “The United States is our biggest foreign market,” Toubart says. “Americans love Champagne. The issue is distribution, because importers are worried about the losses caused by the tariffs.”

For now, however, there is no sign of an emergency. “We can’t call it a crisis yet, but a certain degree of tension is beginning to spread among some independent growers,” says Fabrice Chaudier, a sales consultant for companies in the industry.

Meanwhile, in July, Comité Champagne decided to lower the marketable yield for this year’s harvest to 8,800 kilograms per hectare, from 9,000 in 2025 — a figure that had already been cut by 10%. The move is expected to reduce production by about 10 million bottles, helping prevent excess inventory from building up and going unsold.

“There is a typically French belief that you can influence demand by controlling supply,” Chaudier says. In his view, the industry is stubbornly clinging to a strategy that is not working. “It’s an outdated way of thinking because wine and Champagne are not markets driven by supply and demand. These are products people buy for pleasure, not out of necessity, so they are consumed when they are available.”

Especially in France, where the flutes, for now, are still being filled.