Walking along the vineyards of mainstream, commercial estates
I had the idea to make this visual story when driving through the Bordeaux region a couple months ago : I didn't take pictures there alas outside of my visits, but the roads were lined with vineyards showing the different shades and modes of herbicide sprayings,
it was visually very interesting. You had them all, there was the old school ones (nothing survives,
the ground looks like it's the moon), the progressive ones (sustainable we'd say) with neat, unsprayed grass (lawn) on every other row like you would almost picnic on the grass and think you'll remain healthy, and there was yet another spraying mode I'll call it the stealth mode : it's harder to detect at first glance because the parcel looks like it's plowed et all, but when you pause and look closely you can see that there's been herbicide under the rows even though the whole surface seems to have been plowed, nice try, this may fool many average visitor and possibly knowledgeable ones...
Appearance trumps fact, it's known and human, and we often fall in the trap; a blond woman can pass for Angela Davis using suntan cream and curly hairdo and people buy it for years, same for some growers who, knowing that the vineyard side of the wine is now visited, use tricks like spraying herbicide and cover their tracks with a nice plowing afterwards (or the other way around, like the cropped image on the left seems to imply for this particular parcel). I was fooled myself one day while walking among parcels with a vigneron, I pointed to what looked like a nicely-worked parcel thinking it was his, but it wasn't : he showed me the thing from close, and you could see clearly from the clods that hadn't been overturned that this nice-looking plot had been heavily sprayed. I hadn't the reflex alas this day to shoot an incriminating picture but I'll add it when I come accross such an occurence again.
I think it's obvious that this cosmetic approach to show a nice face even though the soil will get its fair share of chemicals comes from the fact that mainstream winegrowers and estates know that people begin to wander in the vineyard and look at the ground. This post is open-ended photo story which I'll name "50 Shades of Brown to yellow". you'll find there my latest collections of weird-looking parcels from different regions, most of the pictures will ideally have to be shot around april-may because that's the best season to visualize the herbicide-colored grass, and I encourage wine amateurs to themselves visit a given wine region at this time of the year in order to realize that most domaines still use weedkillers very generously.
The quality and vividness of a wine depends foremost of the way the vineyard is managed, and the use of additives, cellar corrections and modern enology are directly related to the quality (or the lack thereof) of the grapes and soil management.
I'll post again the photo essay next year at about the same time with additional, renewed multi-colored stripes, and this time I'll be alert to spot the interesting (and sometimes innovative) versions of this type of farming. We'll not try to name the domaines behind these pictures, it's so widespread that it would be unfair for those displayed on this story (and they might sue me...).
Hi Bertrand,
I was in Austria recently, and I visited nearly every wine region there, and I did not see any of the intensive spraying that you put here on display. In fact, most vineyards looked free of herbicide spraying, only some were just sprayed on a small surface around the roots (less than 10-20% of the surface).
I have the impression that the spraying of herbicides is nowhere in Europe so prevalent as in France. Is that also your observation?
Posted by: Jan | August 12, 2015 at 06:50 PM
nice post! This is a to-do post for sure. All the people have to see whats the difference between going organic or not!
In my work as an organic vigneron I know the differences very well..
Posted by: Gottfried | August 16, 2015 at 10:08 AM