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The Guardian view on France’s wine crisis: the answer to claret could be clairet | Editorial
These are always anxious weeks in the Bordeaux vineyards, where 15% of France’s wine is grown, including in celebrated places like Chateau Latour and Chateau Mouton-Rothschild. In earlier years, this ritual anxiety among the region’s winegrowers had a pleasingly folkloric quality. In the middle of August, the grapes would ripen and their colour start to turn. About 45 days from now, tradition dictates, it will be time to start picking the 2025 vintage. As the wine writer Edmund Penning-Rowsell put it: “To pick or not to pick is the most momentous decision in the winemaking year in Bordeaux.”
This once timeless rhythm is now collapsing. Part of the problem is the climate crisis. Bordeaux still benefits from its moderate Atlantic climate. But south-west France is getting much hotter and drier. Even in the Gironde region, maximum temperatures have been close to 40C at times this past week. Adaptation, in the form of hardier grapes and greater crop diversity, feels unavoidable.
A much larger challenge, however, is today’s changing wine market. Demand for red wine in general, and for the full-bodied, long maturing red wines with generally high alcohol content that are synonymous with Bordeaux in particular, has slumped. This has affected not just the signature premiers crus in which monarchs and the global rich have always invested, but also the vineyards producing the ordinary Bordeaux red wines sold in supermarkets around the globe. For a region whose wine output is 85% red, this is an existential crisis.
Bordeaux produces around 650m bottles of wine each year; but it currently sells only 500m. Demand for red wine in France has fallen by 38% in the past five years; in the 10 years to 2023 the fall was 45%. Nor is the slump confined to France. Demand in the Chinese market has halved since 2017. US tariffs will undoubtedly hit the 20% of Bordeaux exports that previously went across the Atlantic. These consumption changes are likely to be irreversible, at least in the short and medium term.
A popular response for many would be to slash prices. Global Bordeaux prices soared outrageously in the Chinese boom years. But with consumers turning away in droves, and too many producers operating at a loss, price cuts have not reshaped the market. With aid from the French government and the EU, about 15% of Bordeaux vineyards have instead been dug up and put to new uses, including olives and kiwifruit, since 2019.
In the nick of time, there is now a more traditional but also genuinely radical idea – to produce lighter and less tannic wines. History is on this idea’s side. Bordeaux reds have been known for centuries in Britain as claret. But this much debated word dates from when England’s Henry II and his descendants ruled in medieval Aquitaine. Back then, the reds of Bordeaux were often lighter, fresher wines known as clairet, somewhere between a modern red and a rosé, to be drunk young, which for the English meant soon after they arrived from their voyage from France.
Small amounts of clairet are still produced in parts of the Bordeaux region even now. Today there are moves to expand production with the aim of winning new consumers who have rejected heavier reds. Clairet’s advocates say it should be drunk within a couple of years and should be drunk chilled. Traditional claret drinkers will upend their decanters in disgust. But clairet sounds just the thing to accompany a barbecue over a warm summer weekend.
Gig economy platform Fiverr is laying off 250 employees as it pivots to being an “AI-first company,” CEO Micha Kaufman shared in an essay on X. The move affects around 30 percent of the company’s staff, The Register writes, and it’s not uncommon among tech companies in 2025. Duolingo announced similar plans to become “AI-first” in April.
Kaufman describes this process as returning to “startup mode” and writes that his ultimate goal is to turn Fiverr into “an AI-first company that’s leaner, faster, with a modern AI-focused tech infrastructure, a smaller team, each with substantially greater productivity, and far fewer management layers.” Part of the justification Kaufman offers for why Fiverr doesn’t “need as many people to operate the existing business” is that the company has already integrated AI into its customer support and fraud detection programs.
The first sign that Fiverr might justify layoffs with AI came when Kaufman was interviewed by CBS News in May 2025 about the danger the technology posed to employees. Kaufman specifically advised employees to “automate 100 percent” of what they do with AI, while also claiming that wouldn’t make them replaceable because they were still capable of “non-linear thinking” and “judgement calls.” That advice doesn’t seem like it was ultimately helpful for Fiverr’s own employees.
The company’s cuts affect fewer people than a larger firm like Workday, who announced plans to eliminate 1,750 roles in February 2025. Regardless of the size of the company or its level of investment in AI, though, layoffs have the same effect: More work has to be done by fewer people.
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The next big battleground for podcasts is video — and YouTube wants to cement its dominance.
On Tuesday, YouTube announced a slate of new AI products as it seeks to solidify itself as the leader in the category over competitors like Spotify or Apple.
Starting next year, audio-first podcasters will be able to generate video clips for YouTube from their audio transcripts. The tool uses Google’s Veo AI technology to generate short 30-second to 60-second visuals that can either become a YouTube short or a part of a long-form video upload. The feature will initially be available to a limited set of US podcasters.
The target audience? Audio podcasters with little to no video experience.
There is a class of podcast creators who are not gifted in video or who “don’t want to make the conversation awkward by having four or five cameras in a studio,” T. Jay Fowler, YouTube’s senior director of product management focused on podcasts and music, told Business Insider.
AI-generated video could make it easier for those creators to get started on YouTube, Fowler said.
“You can imagine some partners or podcasters thinking, ‘Oh, getting on YouTube is a big hurdle,'” he said. “It is a video-centric platform. And so this will also help ease people into the experience. They can dip their toe.”
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YouTube emerged as the top player in podcasting by hosting a slate of talk-show style channels from creators like Rhett & Link, Theo Von, and Joe Rogan. About a third of weekly podcast consumers in the US prefer YouTube, beating out all rivals, according to a January report from Edison Research.
But the company is a less natural fit for podcasts that aren’t talk shows and aren’t easily adapted to video. YouTube thinks these new AI tools can help it make inroads there.
Adding video could help audio-focused podcasters meet consumer demand. The share of US adults who said they preferred video podcasts hit 42% in August 2024, up from 32% in October 2022, per a Morning Consult report from October.
Spotify made a big push into video last year and told investors in July that consumption of video podcasts was growing 20 times faster than audio alone. Even Netflix is looking to get into the game. It’s held exploratory meetings with creators and sought to hire a video podcast executive.
But YouTube has a clear head start in the category as a native video platform with a well-established creator ad revenue sharing model. The company’s TikTok-like short-video feature, shorts, can also serve as a marketing tool for podcast creators. Forty-four percent of new podcast audiences begin listening on YouTube, according to a June report from Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights.
On Tuesday, YouTube announced an additional AI-powered tool to help creators clip highlights from their video podcasts for YouTube shorts. Clipping has become an increasingly important marketing tool for podcasters and other long-form creators. The feature will roll out in the coming months, the company said.
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