What is a Foire aux Vins?
If you live in France, you probably know what happens every September. Supermarket wine aisles expand, new bottles appear, and shoppers start looking through the year’s selections.
It is la Foire aux Vins. Literally, the “wine fair”.
For UK readers, there is no exact equivalent. It is not quite a wine festival or a traditional wine fair. Instead, it is a limited period when supermarkets and wine retailers offer a much larger and more carefully selected range of wines than usual.
The tradition began in the 1970s, when French supermarkets started using the format to make a wider range of wines accessible to everyday shoppers. Today, it has become an important part of the French wine calendar.
Why do supermarkets run them?
There is an obvious commercial reason: a Foire aux Vins brings people into the shop specifically to buy wine.
But it also gives shoppers something a normal wine aisle cannot: choice and discovery.
For a few weeks, you can explore different regions, producers and, importantly, vintages. And that last part is where things get interesting.
Wine changes with the growing season. The same vineyard can produce a noticeably different wine from one year to the next.
Three vintages, three expressions
That is exactly what we wanted to share this year at Château Canon-Chaigneau: three consecutive vintages, 2021, 2022 and 2023, produced from the same terroir and the same vines.
The cooler 2021 season gave us a fresh, elegant wine, with bright fruit and a particularly precise expression of the vineyard.
In contrast, 2022 was shaped by a remarkably hot and dry summer. The resulting wine is richer and more concentrated, with generous ripe fruit and greater intensity.
Then came 2023, a more classically Bordeaux vintage, combining freshness, fruit and structure in a beautifully balanced style.
The vineyard remained the same. The weather did not, and neither did the wines.
Tasting the three side by side is therefore not about deciding which vintage is “best”. It is an opportunity to discover how the same place can express itself differently from one growing season to the next.
Our Foire aux Vins runs from Monday 21 September to Sunday 4 October across France and the EU.
Three vintages. One plot. Three distinct expressions of the same place — and, we think, one of the best ways to understand what a vintage really means.