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Green Champagne: The quickening march to sustainable vineyards

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Green Champagne: The quickening march to sustainable vineyards 

No French wine region has been revolutionised over the past two decades as dramatically as Champagne. And no appellation has needed it more desperately. For decades, Champagne has been the laughing stock of responsible growers everywhere, notoriously piling on herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilisers and even Parisian rubbish to shamelessly bolster its poor vines to ludicrous yields. But the slow march to change is gathering momentum on the hillsides of Champagne, and in the past two years it has intensified like never before. Though not as you might expect. 

In the silent dormancy of winter, the skeletons of naked vines reveal the stark disparity of soil treatments, even from afar. From the upstairs terrace of his home above his Larmandier-Bernier cellars at the southern end of the Côte des Blancs, Pierre Larmandier showed me a panoramic view of the hillside of Vertus. ‘Ten years ago, we could look out and it was only our vineyards that appeared green in winter, thanks to grasses cultivated in the mid-rows, but now there are more and more,’ he points out excitedly. 

It’s a spectacular visual manifestation of a slow yet steady transformation in the mindset of Champagne growers. Just 17 years ago, Larmandier and Anselme Selosse (Jacques Selosse) expressed interest in purchasing a vineyard in Vertus, and the agent was surprised that both showed such interest in the way the vines had been tended, without the use of herbicides, having never seen buyers interested in this before. 

Selosse and Larmandier were instrumental among a small band of like-minded growers, the radical pioneers who inspired a generation of Champenois to embrace responsible viticulture. Their story is well familiar, and rightfully celebrated. Now a new chapter is unfolding, with an unexpected and dramatic twist. 

Later on the same day, I found myself bumping through the hallowed ground of Le Mesnil-sur-Oger on the edge of Vertus in the big truck of Larmandier’s neighbour, organic leader Pascal Doquet. A stark and surprising reality begins to emerge as he points out the green vineyards: Louis Roederer, Taittinger, Moët & Chandon. ‘The large houses are planting grasses in the mid-rows, ploughing and taking better care of the vines than the small growers,’ he reveals. 

The romanticised aura of growers as the heroes who are saving Champagne from the industrialised menace of the houses has long been the rhetoric of the wine world. Not only is this a fundamentally flawed and simplistic misconception, the truth today is that precisely the opposite is playing out between the vines. 

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