About
About this site
Buvez du vin is French for "drink wine". This site answers a narrower question than its name: what was the weather like while the grapes grew?
For 41 wine regions it shows each vintage's growing-season heat, its rain and the rain at harvest, set against that region's own 1991–2020 normal, so you can see at a glance which years ran hot, cool, dry or wet. The site is French first; this English edition carries every page and figure.
What it is not. It does not score vintages or wines, and it says nothing about taste. Weather is one input among many: site, soil, grape, vine age and the grower's decisions matter as much. There are no brands, prices or sales here.
How it is made. An automated system run by the site's owner fetches the open climate data described on the methodology page, computes every number and chart, and rebuilds the site each week, picking up each new year of data when it is published. No figure is typed in by hand. The list of main grapes for each region is general wine knowledge and is labelled as such.
Independence. No region, producer or retailer pays to appear here. There are no ads or affiliate links today; if that changes, the privacy page will say so first.
Why the name
A slogan from 1933
In 1933 the French Ministry of Agriculture commissioned the poster artist Leonetto Cappiello (born in Livorno in 1875, died in Cannes in 1942) to design a poster for a campaign promoting the wines of France. Its slogan was « Buvez du vin et vivez joyeux », "drink wine and live joyfully", and the poster showed a happy couple on a map of France overflowing with grapes.
The two halves of that slogan name two sister sites: this one, about the weather of each vintage, and vivezjoyeux.fr, a French guide to public holidays, long weekends and school holidays that also suggests trips to the French wine regions. The grape-cloud map of France in this section is our own drawing, made for these sites in the spirit of the era's posters; it is not the poster.
The campaign belonged to its time. Between the wars, French officials and some doctors promoted wine as healthy; those claims were later shown to be wrong. Today's health authorities, including the World Health Organization and Santé publique France, say that no level of alcohol consumption is risk-free. We keep the name as a piece of cultural history, not as advice.
Source on the poster and its context: "Vin et santé", French Wikipedia; on the artist: Leonetto Cappiello, Wikipedia. We do not reproduce the poster: it is in the public domain in France but, as we read the rules, still under copyright in the United States, where this site is hosted, until the end of 2028.
Spotted a figure that looks wrong? That is useful to know. The methodology page explains how each number is made, which usually explains a surprise.