A bubble it is not: The organic movement is only slowly taking root in France’s Champagne region, although its proponents believe environmentally friendly techniques can help the sparkling wine express even finer subtleties.
Organic farming has experienced a boom in recent years, in France, too, where the wine industry has been keen to adopt practices that shun synthetic chemicals and fertilizers.
If 5 percent of all agricultural land in France was being organically farmed or in the process of conversion in 2015, the figure was 8.7 percent for the wine sector, according to data from the public-private agency that promotes “green” farming in France.
Photo: AFP
However, there are regional disparities, and the Champagne region is trailing with just 1.9 percent under organic production, even if the amount of land there carrying an “Agence Bio” (AB) certification increased by 14 percent between 2015 and last year.
Organic farming is not for those looking to make a quick buck or jump on the latest bandwagon.
“If you’re just looking to put a pretty seal on your label, you’ll be disappointed very quickly,” said Pascal Doquet, president of the association of organic Champagnes.
Doquet said he spent “six years between the beginning of the conversion process and the first sale of bottles” bearing the AB seal.
The slow maturation of Champagne, an element of its quality and the cachet which allows the wines to command premium prices, is a disadvantage when going green.
Converting the land to organic farming is a three-year process. Then, there is the requirement that Champagne must mature in bottles for at least 15 months, with many makers leaving it even longer.
Another crucial element is climate, which needs to be cool with little sunshine to help the grapes mature slowly. Dampness is also a challenge, especially as organic farming sharply limits which treatments can be used.
For many practitioners, organic is as much a philosophy as a process.
Doquet said he has had to become a “real farmer,” cultivating the vine’s “capacity for resistance,” while other winemakers were mere “technicians.”
The respect for the environment that underpins the organic movement’s philosophy fits in with the French concept of terroir, where soil, topography and climate all combine to influence the taste of the wine.
Less invasive farming techniques can therefore help produce wines that better reflect the nuances of their environment, or “make the terroir sing,” as Eric Rodez, head of a family winery at Ambonnay in the Marne Valley, puts it.
It was a much more “demanding” way of wine-making, “living life by the rhythm of nature, not the clock of the world,” he says.
However, his family winery, which consists of 6 hectares and produces about 50,000 bottles per year, now produced “liberated wines” with more “expressive” scents and flavors, Rodez says.
The idea has caught the attention of at least one of the leading Champagne houses — Louis Roederer Champagne.
Unusual among large houses in that it grows its own grapes, 10 of Louis Roederer’s 240 hectares are certified as organic, and it plans to gradually convert all of its land.
“For me, organic is an obvious choice, because it is the terroir that makes wines unique,” house cellar master Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon said. “That uniqueness can’t come from a massive blanket of chemicals that neutralize flavors.”
Even if the Champagne region does not yet embrace organic farming widely, it has been reducing its use of chemicals. Over the past 15 years, the region has cut the use of nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides by half, according to the Comite Champagne, the trade association for the 300 Champagne houses and 15,000 winemakers.
And in 2014, it launched its own certification of “sustainable viticulture,” specially tailored to the Champagne region.
So far, more than 4,000 hectares out of the region’s 34,000 hectares have received the certification.
Nevertheless, few of the big Champagne houses appear to be in any rush to go organic.
Lecaillon said those who did must be ready to accept that “in certain years, they could lose 10, 20 or even 30 percent of the harvest,” without the help of chemical fertilisers and treatments.
But it’s not just a question of “economic short-termism” that is preventing Champagne houses from going green, Lecaillon said.
Since most large Champagne houses buy much of their grapes from growers, those growers would be required to go organic too.
Consumers, too, have little leverage to pressure producers into going green, because organic Champagnes are still a niche market and are rarely seen on supermarket shelves.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day