Buying a wine estate in France: the house, its vines and what to check

Wine estate, wine property, vineyard for pleasure: what are we talking about?

The same word covers three purchases. The vineyard for pleasure is a house surrounded by a few hectares of vines, entrusted to a neighbouring grower or to a vineyard-services company; the wine property adds a winery and a production, often sold to a cooperative winery or a wine merchant; the working estate, finally, is a business, with its brand, its customers, its stock and its staff.

The first two are bought as a property: a house, land, buildings. The third is bought as a business, with an accounting, commercial and technical audit that Home Select does not carry out: it then introduces the specialist firms and the vineyard experts, and stays at your side for the house.

Where to buy a wine estate in France?

Demand gathers where vines, climate and a pleasant life meet. The Bordeaux region offers the greatest variety, from the château of Saint-Émilion to the chartreuse of the Entre-deux-Mers, around Bordeaux. Provence sells vines and the sea: the slopes of Bandol and Cassis, the vines of the Aix-en-Provence countryside and those of the gulf of Saint-Tropez.

The Languedoc and the Rhône valley offer more space for a more contained budget; Burgundy and Champagne remain narrow markets, where vines change hands between vineyard families. Everywhere, the distance to a station or an airport weighs on value as soon as the estate is to be lived in several months a year.

How is the price of a wine estate formed?

The price of an estate reads in two parts. The house is compared with the local house market, which it often exceeds through its size and character; the DVF register files it among houses, without telling the bastide from the village house. The vines are valued per hectare, according to the appellation, the age of the plants, the exposure and their health.

Every year, the French Ministry of Agriculture publishes an indicative scale of the average market value of farmland and vines, by region and by appellation: it is the first benchmark to read the price of an estate’s vines. The winery, the equipment and the stock, when included, are priced separately, with a vineyard expert.

SAFER, tenant farming, authorisations: which rules apply to vines?

The sale of farmland, vines included, is notified to the SAFER, the rural land development agency, which holds a right of pre-emption to keep land in farming. The notaire organises the notification; the timetable of the sale takes it into account.

Vines leased to a grower fall under the tenant farming regime: the rural lease protects the farmer, who himself holds a priority right of pre-emption when the land he farms is sold. Farming land yourself may require an authorisation to farm under the structures control, depending on the area and the region.

Planting or replanting vines requires an authorisation, issued by FranceAgriMer within the European framework. An estate is therefore also judged on its planted areas, their grape varieties, their age and their condition: grubbed-up vines cannot be replanted freely.