The glass comes first. On the Thursday in June 2025 when Bordeaux Fête le Vin opened — the 19th, four days of heat haze over the river — the quays filled with people wearing the same accessory: a tulip-shaped tasting glass in a holder around the neck, swinging like a pendant. Behind them stretched the actual festival: pavilions flying the names of the appellations, from Margaux to Saint-Émilion, in a line between the water mirror and the old maritime exchange. The wine trade had decamped from its châteaux to the city centre, and the city had come out to meet it. For four days, the riverbank stops being a promenade and becomes a route — one you walk with a small glass, at walking pace, five centilitres at a time.
A wine route that installs itself downtown
The mechanics are disarmingly simple. Entry to the site is free; tasting is what costs, and only if you want it to. The 2025 edition gathered some 1,200 growers and négociants under nine appellation pavilions, with eighty appellations from Bordeaux and the wider Nouvelle-Aquitaine region represented, and about thirty restaurant and food stands alongside. The Bordeaux tourist office has run the event since its first edition in 1998, at the end of June each year — a biennial ritual for its first two decades, annual since the pandemic years shuffled the calendar, with the one-time companion festival of the river, launched in 1999 for the alternating years, quietly retired after 2020.
That Pass Dégustation is the key that everyone wears. In 2025 it came in two sizes: a Pass 4 at 14 euros for four pours, and a Pass 10+ at 23 euros, which added a thirty-minute workshop at the Bordeaux Wine School — two more glasses, guided — plus a visit on the Graves and Sauternes wine route. A glass and its neck holder are included, which is why half of Bordeaux spends festival week clinking through the streets with stemware on a lanyard.
Sails over the Garonne
The other signature is maritime. Tall ships have moored along the quays for most of the festival’s life — the Belem and the Santa Maria Manuela in recent years — and in 2025 the visiting fleet was three ships deep: El Galeón, a replica of a seventeenth-century Spanish galleon, the Saint-Malo three-masted barque Le Français, and the Spanish schooner Pascual Flores, all open for five-euro deck tours. At dusk the sky takes over. Since 2023 the fireworks have been retired in favour of drones, and the 2025 show was the third running: 550 light-painting drones flown by the Gironde firm Dronisos, two free night displays over the river, watched from the left bank.
By day, the pageantry runs on older fuel. Brotherhoods in robes parade along the quays — the Grand Conseil du vin de Bordeaux leading the confréries and the ships’ crews — and barrel-makers give public demonstrations of their craft, charring hoops of oak in the open air. The 2025 edition sweated through a heatwave, which local coverage noted nudged everyone toward chilled whites, rosés and crémants, and evening strolls instead of midday marathons.
Attendance has settled in recent editions at around 200,000 visitors — a figure cited by Sud Ouest ahead of the 2025 edition, well below the half-million crowds of the 2010 boom years, when the festival outgrew its own quays. The current, more compact format is a deliberate recalibration: less spectacle of scale, more conversation per glass, with the buying done through an online pop-up shop the interprofessional board trialled for the first time in 2025, and festival bottles washed and refilled rather than crushed for recycling.
A year off, then a wedding with the tall ships
Here is the part worth knowing before planning a trip: there is no 2026 edition. The festival takes 2026 off, announced well in advance, because something bigger is arriving. From 7 to 11 July 2027, Bordeaux Fête le Vin returns — shifted to July for the first time, and stretched to five days — married to the start of the Tall Ships Races, the international tall-ship race that last departed from Bordeaux in 1990. Some forty schooners and barques will line the Garonne before sailing for A Coruña in Spain and then Sines in Portugal, with around a thousand growers pouring along the quay as the fleet leaves. The river festival that ended in 2020 will, in a sense, have merged into the wine festival it used to alternate with.
The cliché
Bordeaux Fête le Vin is a trade fair — suits, price lists, and a velvet rope around the good stuff.
Reality
The quays are free and open, families drift between music stages and food stands, and the tasting pass is optional kit at 14 euros. The growers behind the pavilion counters are there to talk, not to impress. It is a city festival that happens to be about wine, not a cellar door with an entry fee.
So the quays empty at the end of June, the ships sail on, and Bordeaux goes back to being a city with a river through it. But the vintage those pavilions were pouring is already last year’s news: out on the left bank, the thing the festival celebrates — the new crop — is months from existing, waiting on a rite of its own. The harvest does not come to the quays. The quays come to the harvest, every June, a season early.