The Buyer: Stephen Cronk on how the wild fires are a wake-up call to climate change

The summer of 2021 will be remembered by the international wine community for the devastating fires that have wreaked havoc across so many of the world’s most famous wine regions. Over the last few days thousands of hectares of forest, and potentially hundreds of hectares of vines have been caught up in wild fires across Provence and large parts of south east France, wreaking havoc as they teared across the land. Here, in an impassioned opinion piece with The Buyer our Co-founder Stephen Cronk describes what it has been like to feel the brute force of nature and how close he, his family and team came to losing Domaine Mirabeau and why we all need to wake up to the dangers of climate change and take real, effective action.

Read Stephen’s Full Opinion Piece Here

“The past few days have been heartbreaking to watch, as the devastation has unfolded over Provence with fires sweeping across 7000 hectares of land and protected forest. These forests are a crucial source of life, full of rich biodiversity, co-existing alongside human habitations in our busy and heavily populated area of the South of France. We have also been waiting in agony and praying for our Domaine Mirabeau and the vineyards of our colleagues and partners in the area, as so much of our hard work is put at risk by the raging fires”.

“Whilst we are still taking in the magnitude of what has happened, we hope this will serve as a further wake up call that climate change means that these types of events will be more frequent and more devastating to all of us. Now more than ever we must look to how we will move forward to recover, but also do our best to prevent these from happening again”.