
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Wine producers in Switzerland are carefully watching a courthouse in Burgundy, just a small mountain range (Jura) away, where French winemaker Emmanuel Giboulot appeared before a Dijon judge Monday 24 February.
Giboulot is accused of not following an agriculture department order issued to all wine grape growers in Burgundy to use an insecticide that wipes out leafhoppers. The otherwise harmless insect can be a carrier of an incurable vine disease called flavescence dorée.
The disease was first reported in 1949 in the Armagnac region in France and after nearly 65 years the only solution once it appears in a vineyard is to burn infected vines and use insecticide as a preventive measure.
Last week the Swiss federal agriculture office said that the leafhoppers, Scaphoideus titanus, have now been spotted as far into Switzerland as the centre of canton Valais, from Fully to Sierre. The insects were long thought to be found only in the Mediterranean area, but they have been slowly moving north and east.
Giboulot is a biodynamic wine producer, a philosophic step beyond organic, and his family has not used chemicals in their vineyard for several years; his father began to convert the winery to organic methods in the 1970s. The son, in his early 50s, faced a possible six-month prison sentence and €30,000 fine if found guilty but the public prosecutor Monday asked for a €1,000 fine, part of it suspended.
The judge will rule 7 April on the case, but it already represents something of a victory for those opposed to the draconian insecticide measures.
Worse than nothing? the debate rages
Giboulot has pointed out that the insecticides used haven’t stopped the march of the disease and that they weaken nature’s ability to fight it because it doesn’t precisely target just the leafhopper. Other insects, including some that are useful for keeping plants healthy, are killed off. He doesn’t use the word napalm but other growers who back him do.
Giboulot says that “if there were really a major risk I probably would have treated [with insecticide].
The point, he says, is that the disease has not been found in his region, the Côte d’Or. “It’s as if you decided to treat with chemotherapy even though you haven’t diagnosed cancer”, he told his friend and former student Pierre Guigui, who waxes indignant about the case on Facebook.
Guigui carries considerable weight: he is the wine editor of the Gault & Millau magazine and author of several wine guides. The Giboulot case and accusations that biodynamic growers are polluting by using copper sparked an angry article by him, “France has 85,000 wine grape producers, 4,000 of which are certified as organic or biodynamic, just 5 percent of the total. Which means that 95 percent of grape growers are “conventional” … viticulture accounts for 2.6 to 3 percent of agricultural land and uses 20 percent of the phytosanitary products (source INRA, federal research institute).”
Le Monde backed up Guigui’s remarks Monday, noting that France is Europe’s largest user of pesticides . “The Ecophyto programme, launched in 2008 to reduce the use of phytosanitary products, has not given the hoped-for results.”
Figaro reports today that France has just launched its “Bee friendly” programme to promote products made without resorting to insecticides harmful to bees.
There is heated debate among producers in France and Switzerland about whether the mass insecticide use against leafhoppers is a good solution. Le Monde 24 February says that the case is dividing French ecologists and wine producers. Large wineries in France are indignant that Giboulot may be giving them a bad name, with all the publicity the case is receiving. Some are taking pains to say their use of chemicals is strictly limited. The agriculture office is insistent that growers who do not use insecticide are irresponsible.
“We have the impression [officials] are trying to set an example here rather than stepping back and trying to get things in perspective,” Giboulot told French news media Le Monde last November.
He doesn’t use the word napalm to describe the action of the insecticide, but others have, and they voice concern about the ultimate risk to consumers. The one product that biodynamic growers can use is also lethal but “leaves less residue”, according to Guigui.
The disease hit vineyards in Burgandy in 2012 to such an extent that up to 12 hectares of vines were destroyed, officials have said. The region has 29,500 hectares of vineyard in total.
Giboulot’s 10 hectares of vines are near Beaune, in the southern Côte d’Or, where Burgundy’s most treasured grapes grow. Last summer when his winery was checked for conforming to the new regulations the disease had not yet been found in the region, although some plants were deemed “suspicious”. Officials there have argued in the French media that once the disease is found the number of infected plants is multiplied by 10 the following year, and therefore spraying all plants preventively is necessary.
Swiss vineyards: watching the vines carefully

The leafhoppers have not yet carried the disease to the news areas in Switzerland where they have been found, nor to the Côte de Beaune and Hautes Côtes de Nuits, home to some of Burgundy’s most highly treasured wines.
Swiss wine grape growers have been asked to be extremely vigilant and to buy only healthy new plants from verified “clean” sources in order to avoid mass insecticide use, as officials in France mandated. Even before the order, notes wine producer Guigui, France was recording one of the highest uses of insecticide per planted hectare of vine.
Switzerland’s biodynamic growers are small in number, but several wine producers who do not subscribe to this approach have told me they have great respect for their colleagues, and their work is probably part of the reason Switzerland has been a pioneer in environmentally friendly Integrated Production methods.
Biodynamic wine producers are part of the estimated 250,000 biodynamic farmers on five continents. Their approach to food production pre-dates organic farming by some 50 years.
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