Much Ado About Nothing

Ecologic progress loses out yet again in Champagne's latest. cahier des charges changes

Herbicide usage in Champagne this string

Between the hurricanes and tornadoes, wildfires, floods and droughts, it seems climate change is remodeling the wine industry on many fronts.  Several wine regions have implemented more ecological measures in the vineyard, winery and packaging, hoping this will keep more climate induced disasters at bay. Champagne has long had a conflicted relationship with climate change action. For the last four decades, the Quality and Sustainability department of the Comité Champagne (CIVC) has been trying to reduce the appellation’s carbon footprint, and they have made a lot of progress. Nevertheless, the reduction of chemical sprays – and especially herbicides - and unnecessary packaging, is something the Champenois struggle to let go of.

In the case of herbicides, there has been plenty of lip service about reductions; in 2018, both co-presidents of the CIVC – Maxime Toubart, who still today presides over the Syndicat Général des Vignerons (SGV), and Jean-Marie Barillère, the previous president of the Union des Maisons de Champagne (UMC) – even went as far as announcing, with a lot of bells and whistles, that the Champagne region would have eradicated all herbicides by 2025. However, one look at the orange scorched vineyard soils this spring, easily illustrates how far the actual herbicide practices in the region diverge from this lofty promise. Something also backed up by CIVC herbicide usage data; the herbicide IFT has been increasing year on year both in 2023 and 2024.

Nonetheless, this spring, when the Champagne vine-scape once again looked more like a nuclear wasteland than farmland, it seemed there might have been a breakthrough. The SGV voted a change to the cahier des charges (the appellation rule book) to ban all synthetic herbicides in between the vine rows – a change to be implemented by the 2025 season. On closer look, it is yet another smokescreen as very little will change; in fact things may further degenerate considering the exact wording of the ban:  “The width of the strip that can use chemical herbicides is maximum  40 centimeters on either side of the vine row.”

Knowing that the majority of the region’s vineyards are planted at 1 meter to 1.2 meters between the rows (the CIVC reference in the Vignes Semi Large (VSL) study was 1.1 meter) – this merely means that herbicides will be banned in one fifth to one third of the vineyard – which is a far cry from a total ban. Moreover, this also continues to stretch the nationally set glyphosate restrictions – which originally stated the herbicide could not be applied on more than one fifth of the vineyard. While this statement was eventually dropped from the restriction, the actual quantities of glyphosate allowed (450g/ha/year) remain one fifth of the producer recommended glyphosate dose per hectare (2.25 kg/ha/year).