Republished from Ellen’s Wine World
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.
Giboulet 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.