Beaune Viticultural School: Learning Viticulture
Episode 4 in a series about how future winemakers are trained in Burgundy.
This is the fourth article of a series. The first, which concerns pruning, can be found here. The second, which concerns wine tasting, is here. The third, which concerns wine accounting and rural land law, is here.
Tomorrow, viticulture will belong to investors. You’ll have families of winegrowers, and the rest of viticulture will belong to investors, and to banks. - Cairanne vigneron Marcel Richaud
READING ABOUT VINES
In defense of the tutors who lead the two weeks of on-site training that comprise the Beaune Viticultural School’s BPREA distance-learning course in viticulture, theirs is an impossible task. Viticulture is a deep, nuanced subject, encompassing biology, chemistry, geography, geology, history, economics, law, and more. In two weeks, you simply cannot transmit more than a head-spinning overview of the subject’s complexity.
In efforts to mitigate this, Beaune Viti’s BPREA distance-learning course in viticulture is supplemented with an on-line study aid, unfortunately one of such unnavigable impenetrability that it makes one pine for the era of the CD-ROM. I discovered the existence of this on-line study aid the evening before I came to Beaune for the first week of instruction in late February. I stayed up into the wee morning hours, perusing irregular slides cut-and-pasted from text books and public online sources, and taking quizzes on their contents, which ranged from vine anatomy to types of fungal diseases to common vine pests. I had the sense that I was cramming, late at night and on-the-fly, from study materials that had themselves been created late at night and on-the-fly.
There were moments of levity. The study materials included educational videos produced in heavily-accented English by France’s various viticultural institutions. These had subsequently been subtitled or dubbed back into French for inclusion in the Beaune Viti courses. The effect, each time, was sort of like watching a spaghetti western from the 1960s, redubbed for release in Italy.
I was dismayed to confront, at the end of these study materials, three important-sounding pieces of homework, due immediately, which I had not begun. They included presentations on the calendar of viticultural work in my region of installation (a choice I still have not made), along with several other subjects.
Various excuses and apologies swum around in my head for the first few days of classes, as I awaited some mention of these overdue presentations. By the third day, I began to wonder whether they’d be mentioned at all. It seemed reassuring that most of the classes were simply repeating the materials I had studied online.
That morning, the program director visited our classroom and said she had something important to discuss with us. Here it goes, I thought. Now I will be revealed, the unserious student who failed to complete the required presentations ! A total faker, a drinker among the farmers!
“Which of you have signed up for lunches at the cafeteria?” she asked. “Because the cafeteria staff insist that those who have signed up for lunches at the cafeteria must indeed go and have those lunches at the cafeteria. You can’t just go eat lunch elsewhere if you feel like it. The cafeteria staff have made you lunches.”
An outcry ensued, because, as it turned out, the cafeteria lunches had been staggered at peculiar intervals due to COVID precautions, in a way that obliged students who had signed up for them to miss thirty minutes of lesson time. None of this concerned me in the slightest, because I had not signed up for lunches in the cafeteria.
When the furor died down, I raised my hand and asked when we would be obliged to turn in the presentations mentioned in the online course work. All the program director would say was that at the end of the second week of studies in viticulture, there would be one presentation due, on a topic of each student’s choosing.
“So the three presentations mentioned on the on-line platform will not be due,” I pursued.
The program director demurred, replying in such a way as to lead me to conclude she either a) was unaware of these presentations, or b) had not found any tutor willing to grade them.
“It’s a shame there are never courses that occur when the vines are growing,” observed the tutor when the program director had left, along with the handful of students who’d made the mistake of signing up for lunch at the cafeteria. “When there’s something to actually see!”
BURGUNDY PROBLEMS
Befitting a viticultural school in Beaune - but perhaps disappointing to students planning to establish estates in other regions - the viticulture lessons are very Burgundy-focused. It’s not just that, for example, the pruning lessons cover only guyot training. All the viticultural instruction at Beaune Viti is inscribed within the Burgundy economy, where certain parameters are assumed.
It is assumed, for instance, that students will be working with vines trained on wires (palissage), simply because such training is ubiquitous in the region; working otherwise entails far higher labor costs. It is assumed students will be employing fertilizers of some kind. It’s considered a necessity, if one wishes to do the “normal” yields within the region. This is called to faire le rendement. When, in the course of the instruction, I asked a tutor what, precisely, is le rendement, he replied it’s the maximum permitted yield within a given appellation.
In the course of a decade interviewing natural vignerons, I’ve rarely encountered anyone who attains the maximum permitted yield in their appellation. When they do, like Christian Binner on certain of his parcels in 2018, it’s occasion for wild-eyed glee. In normal years, most natural vignerons work with yields far lower than the maximum permitted yield within their appellations. It’s the price of traditional, more-than-organic farming - because maximum permitted yields are invariably based upon the normalization of synthetic fertilizers.
Among conventional Burgundy vignerons it is apparently assumed that anyone with any good sense hits - which, in practice, is surely to say, slightly exceeds - the maximum permitted yield in non-catastrophic years. For Bourgogne Rouge this is 60HL/ha. (To put this figure in perspective, the natural Beaujolais vignerons I know generally obtain between 30-40Hl/ha. Yields are similar among the natural vignerons I know in Burgundy.)
I mention all this because potential yields are intimately linked to real estate valuation. The economic pressure to faire le rendement is proportional to the value of a given hectare. The maximum price of a hectare of vines in a Grand Cru Burgundy appellation, as of 2018, was 14’500’000€. In Faugères it was 21’000€. This helps explain why Burgundy at large is not the sort of region where vignerons routinely uproot rows to plant fruit trees, or pasture cows. The sort of non-productivist farming practiced by many of the vignerons I most admire - the Andrieu siblings of Clos Fantine in Faugères, for example, or Romain des Grottes in the Beaujolais - is considered downright fanciful in Burgundy (and, to be fair, elsewhere).
Like many natural wine tasters, I’m preoccupied by the aesthetic and moral debates surrounding what’s in the glass. But never was the gap between the wine taster and the wine farmer more apparent to me than when studying Burgundy viticulture among the other BPREA candidates, most of whom were, sensibly, trying to build a successful agriculture business.
Instructors at Beaune Viti - many of whom are vignerons themselves - are lately preoccupied with frost and grapevine fanleaf virus. The latter is a pernicious disease spread chiefly by nematodes, against which the only defense is to be exceedingly scrupulous about preparation of earth before planting and choice of vine material. Some advise disinfecting pruning shears with a bleach solution between plants, to avoid spreading the disease while pruning, but I have never heard of anyone taking the trouble to do this. (Most consider pruning to be quite enough of an ordeal as it is.)
The challenge of frost is being met on numerous fronts. One instructor noted that in Burgundy, in the 20th century, everyone chose precocious rootstock, because vignerons struggled to achieve full ripeness at that time. By replanting with late-ripening rootstock, a vigneron might help mitigate frost risk while also adapting to today’s warmer climate. Any solution that involves replanting, however, is sure to be met with minimal enthusiasm by vignerons, since it’s a costly and laborious task of which the benefits arrive only many years later. In the meantime, many are trying to train vines higher off the ground, to avoid cold air in spring.
My first week of viticulture education occurred before this year’s catastrophic black frost. My second week of courses occurred just after. The vibe among the instructors was somewhat stunned and funereal.
“It was a mass of cold air at -4°C or -5°C,” said one instructor. “Against a black frost like that, there’s not much you can do.”
SELLING ORGANICS
The instructor tasked with presenting organic viticulture to the class over the course of two afternoons previously held a job selling RoundUp and other phytosanitary products for Coop Bourgogne Sud. If her career change had anything to do with her conscience, she hid it very well.
Presumably due to the emotional stakes involved, she presented organics to the class in a strikingly non-judgmental way. She never once said, for instance, that organic agriculture is better for the environment, or for the quality of groundwater, or that it yields superior grapes. Instead her discourse seemed intended to normalize organics for the benefit of students who might otherwise find the approach exotic or economically unfeasible.
As of 2017, she noted, just 17% of the Côte d’Or was farmed organically. As of 2019, it had climbed to 21%. Today, fully 25% of the Côte d’Or is either certified or in organic conversion, a three-year process. The previous year, she’d helped fifty-nine estates initiate the process of organic conversion. To hear her tell it, organics is sweeping the region like a dance craze. But she didn’t make any coherent argument for going organic. Organics was a dance you, too, could do, and you should think about it, because after all, it was a craze.
She summarized it to the students thusly: “It amounts to thirty percent more labour, for roughly thirty percent lower yields.” But, she added, estates working in organics for over ten years tended to do similar yields to their conventional counterparts.
She asked the class for reasons why a vigneron would choose to obtain organic certification. Someone duly noted that consumers seek organic wines.
“Right,” replied the instructor, before introducing a real whopper of a non-truth. “In France, certainly. But not in the USA. In the USA and on export markets, they prefer the HVE certification, Haute Valeur Environmentale.”
Throughout the viticulture courses, I avoided piping up in class, since many of the other students surely had more viticultural experience than me. On the subject of the US export market, however, I felt I was a unique position to comment. I interjected and tried to explain to the tutor and the class that what she had just said was an inversion of reality. The HVE label - a shameless greenwashing certification used almost exclusively by enormous quasi-industrial estates - had, to my knowledge, no traction whatsoever on export markets (where the acronym doesn’t even scan). Whereas many longtime practicing-organic vignerons that I’ve spoken to over the years have obtained organic certification specifically to appease their importers, often in the USA, UK, Denmark, or Sweden.
One of just two other times I felt obliged to add my two cents, throughout these two weeks, also concerned this HVE canard. This was during a lengthy presentation of vineyard blights, from insects to bacteria, viruses, and fungi. A comely young student hailing from Pouilly-Fumé rose her hand, and, when called upon, seemed to speak in the voice of an embittered uncle:
“So really,” she said, “all the organic and biodynamic and HVE estates are hypocritical when they complain about their neighbors’ conventional spray treatments. Because their neighbors are subject to their vine maladies.”
“HVE is not the same as biodynamics or even organics!” I cried, too forcefully and without raising my hand. “The jokers behind the HVE label created it precisely to muddy the waters so that you’d start using it in the same sentence as those other two certifications, which while not perfect are at least a start towards healthier agriculture!”
The student from Pouilly-Fumé, and indeed much of the class, stared at me, a reminder that it is perhaps unusual to have spent so long pondering the limitations of the various agricultural certifications.
CERTI-PHYTO FOR ALL
Undergirding the Beaune Viticultural School’s distance-learning program is a sort of winking understanding, between the instructors and the students, that it is impossible to learn in ten weeks of classroom presence what the normal BPREA course spreads over a year. (This is to say nothing of the more intensive BTS degree.) Nowhere is this more disturbing than in the single afternoon of instruction about spray treatments. Presence at one rushed three and a half-hour session, by some demonic derogation, counts as having passed a ten-hour Certi-Phyto course, entitling BPREA students to spray chemicals of varying noxiousness out into the world.
Our instructor was a wizened viticultrice who grew chardonnay for crémant, and who possessed an alarming repertoire of anti-organic arguments. I’d heard them all before, from the mouths of conventional vignerons throughout France, and could have devised an entertaining bingo card.
“We use products that are dangerous, and we don’t always have the words to explain what we do,’” she told the future winegrowers. “But don’t use the word ‘justify.’ You’re not wrong to use these products.”
Hilariously, she cast the phytosanitary industry as the victim, suggesting that its lobby can’t be all that powerful, since so many agricultural chemicals have been taken off the market since 2000. By way of assurance as to the human and environmental safety of phytosanitary treatments, she explained that it costs 150 million euros to develop a new product, and 70 million of that was devoted to studies of toxicology and its residues in the environment. (Personally, I would take this as an argument to the contrary. If it costs 70 million euros to assure the non-toxicity of a novel product, perhaps it is better simply not to use that novel product.)
The tutor also turned her fire on non-farmers, citing a study that showed more glyphosate residues in the rivers flowing out of Lyon than going in. “Why?” she demanded. “Home gardeners!”
“The rivers are full of caffeine, hormones, medicine, perfume. But they put all the blame on farmers!”
You get the idea. At times the instruction felt more like an indoctrination in accumulated agricultural aggrievement than a lesson in how to protect oneself and one’s community while employing dangerous chemicals.
Here, however, is a selection of her more practical bits of advice, offered here for what they imply about the safety of conventional phytosanitary treatments:
All phytosanitary products are labeled with a defined zone of non-treatment, ranging from 5m to 100m. That is how far one must remain from water sources while employing them.
The same products are also labeled with a delay of re-entry into a parcel after treatment, ranging from six to forty-eight hours. That is the amount of time you should stay out of the parcel after you employ the product on it.
Another figure to keep in mind, for each product, is the delay before harvest. That is the amount of time that must pass between your final treatment and when you bring in the treated grapes.
Don’t get down from the tractor during spraying.
It’s important to wear a hazmat-type suit while spraying from an open tractor.
It’s very important to pay attention to how you wash the tractor after spraying.
It’s important to wear a visor when washing off the hazmat suit afterwards, because otherwise you’re just spraying all the dangerous molecules of product back in your face.
You should wear long gloves while washing off the tractor and the hazmat suit. And the edges of those gloves should be rolled outwards, to catch drops that would otherwise roll down to your arm.
Don’t bring your dog to the vines during treatments.
Our tutor had no qualms about employing dangerous chemical sprays on vineyards. But she wanted it to be done well. Upon gazing upon the vines near Beaune pictured in the image accompanying this piece, she was gravely offended. It was clear from the wide circumference of herbicide surrounding the parcel that the operator had not shut off the jets of spray when reaching the end of a row. She also noted, from the livid orange of the dead grass, that the operator had employed the herbicide Basta, which was outlawed in 2017.
When she saw me taking a photo, she asked me to share it with her - so she could use it to show students how not to farm.
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Coming Soon: Beaune Viticultural School - Learning Enology
FURTHER READING
Beaune Viticultural School, pt. I: Learning to Prune
Beaune Viticultural School, pt. II: Learning to Taste Wine
Beaune Viticultural School, pt. III: Learning Wine Accounting & Rural Land Law
This teaching system is not up to the job....