Organic growing: happiness is in the offing ... 1/2

Apart from a handful of exceptions, for most people of my generation the changeover to organic methods is the result of a long deliberation. Twenty years ago you could count the number of organic producers in this appellation on… two fingers!

In 1987 when I converted to viticulture from a back ground of modern orchard management - where the number of insecticide treatments per year could reach anything up to thirty, - the methods for treating vines seemed wonderfully simple to me.

Growing apples had however taught me that to have a healthy harvest the fruit needs to be separated out so that the individual fruits are not touching each other, and that they need to be well aerated. Also essential is the fact that one should not be scared of thinning out the crop; ie reducing the yields to concentrate the quality.

We started off in 1989 by pruning even shorter than usual, and by eliminating the second budding in spring so as to keep ripeness at harvest-time more homogeneous.

In 1990 we did our first thinning out of the crop. Next we grassed between the rows – first by planting grass, but soon going back to the natural method of just letting it grow on its own.

The vitality of the vines was noticeably reduced and the yields were kept under control thanks to the spring de-budding and thinning out of the crop, resulting in good quality grapes even in difficult vintages such as 1993, 1994, 1998... and truly splendid grapes in the great years such as 1995, 1996, 1997.

 

But even if we did only used contact weed-killers to get rid of the rampant weeds under the vines and only cultivated the young vines, the idea of ploughing the entire estate seemed unrealistic to me – a folly that maybe a small estate could allow itself, or realistic if just used on selected plots. To be honest, organic growing looked to me like a utopia which could in fact put the economic survival of the estate in peril. This said, it was tempting …

Another thing that made me hesitate, was that all the organic wines I tasted seemed to be rather more mineral with higher acidity. Not a problem for the whites – on the contrary – but this worried me with regards to my red Cabernet Francs. I was concerned that I would lose the suppleness that so appealed to me in my wines. I was loath to change the style of wine I was making. When you’re making something good, which is appreciated, why change?

But our little revolution was underway and in 2001 I stopped all the treatments for botrytis and started working the soil between the vines on the best-quality plots. We started the changeover to organic on the Chenin for the 2004 harvest.
 

Organic growing at Domain Hureau 2/2 >