Jean-François Coutelou's "Ode to Biodiversity"

In 2016, in response to an act of viticultural vandalism, Coutelou wrote a moving note about his work restoring hedges around his vineyards north of Béziers. Here it is in English translation.

Oct 17, 2021

Coutelou at sunset beside one of the many nascent hedges that separate his vineyards from the intensive chemical agriculture surrounding him.

Jean-François Coutelou is a vigneron in Puimuisson, halfway between Béziers and Faugères. His work defies summarization, encompassing everything from conservation of rare Languedoc grape varieties to the maintenance of a cellar full of oxidative and sweet micro-solera wines dating to the early 20th century.

Since 2013, Coutelou has devoted himself to a vast project of viticultural Land Art. From his organically-farmed vineyards, bordered everywhere by execrable mechanized chemical flatland agriculture, he seeks to create a kind of oasis in the pays d’Oc, restoring country hedges and promoting the re-establishment of biodiverse flora and fauna.

In 2016, in a heinous act of viticultural vandalism, a neighbor (or some neighbors) burned his nascent hedges to the ground. Coutelou, among the most eloquent, inventive, and communicative natural vignerons of his generation, responded by penning a moving essay, titled “Ode to Biodiversity,” which he posted to Facebook, along with images of the crime scene. For issue 5, I asked him permission to produce an English translation of his essay, which remains as relevant today as it was five years ago.

ODE TO BIODIVERSITY

Coutelou’s first hedge, after it was burned by neighbors in 2016.

Thank you all for your messages of support throughout this difficulty that I’ve once again encountered.

I don’t proselytize, and I don’t ask my peers to do as I do, but I deem I have the right to do what I want with my vineyards. In 1987, when my father took the decision to subscribe to the Nature et Progrès charter, he was considered an alien. At the time, the Hérault department contained less than 200ha of vines farmed organically; it contains more than 20’000 today.

I think we can’t correct nature, because she is always stronger than man and in the end she wins every time. It suffices to rely upon viticulture manuals from the start of the previous century to read that with only sulfur powder and copper, we can bring the harvest in. Our desire to produce more, using stronger and stronger products, has created resistances that make it so that today, certain growers wind up employing more than fifteen chemical treatments to get the same result.

We can’t be angry at the previous generation. They didn’t know. Modern agriculture constituted social progress for farmers. With the replacement of horses with tractors, the use of herbicides to obviate the work with a hoe, and chemical fertilizers to produce more for less cost, modern agriculture softened the aggravation of work.

But today everyone knows. The water tables are more and more polluted, and we’re obliged to go further and further to find barely potable water that must undergo ever-costlier treatments to barely adhere to standards. Lands are less and less fertile and require greater and greater fertilizer treatments to produce the same quantities.

Because we can’t modify nature, we must try to adapt to changes in climate and find solutions to continue make wine as naturally as possible. Planting trees, bushes, plants, and flowers is part of an initiative conceived for the future.

It recreates sites of biodiversity. By progressively removing hedges, fruit trees, paths, and creeks to create ever larger parcels, we create monocultural vineyard sites, which are rendered more vulnerable, which require more and more interventions, and which are more susceptible to erosion. We’ve eradicated balanced sites, where everything has its place, to create sites modeled by man that permit one to work more rationally, but upon which we’re obliged to intervene to correct. By way of example, a bat can each 2000 insects per night; if we’d conserved its habitat, we wouldn’t be obliged to treat against the grapevine moth.

It works against global warming. You’ve all at one point enjoyed, under the summer sun, the shelter of the shade a tree. It’s the same for vineyard parcels. By planting trees around vines, we break the drying winds of summer. What’s more, in passing through trees, the wind will naturally cool itself. It’s a durable alternative initiative to the installation of irrigation, which is certainly immediately effective, but which perhaps one day, when we’ll have further polluted the water table with waters soon to come from the Rhône, will be limited or even forbidden.

It returns beauty to the countryside. Work in the vines is often mechanized, but it’s also done on foot. Someone who works in a parcel needs an element that breaks the horizon, that permits a view of the end. When parcels are ever larger, they are no longer suited to size of humans, and work becomes machine-like, mechanical, loveless… To raise one’s eyes to see a bird perch in a tree; to shelter at the end of a row to enjoy the cool below an olive tree; to see the butterflies and the bees in springtime come alight upon a row of flowers: these are so many small pleasures that permit whoever works in vines to feel better and to give more love to his or her work.

It’s to invest for the future. In the digital era, when we exist in immediacy, it’s almost a militant act to plant trees that we won’t live to see reach maturity. It was said not so long ago, “Olive tree of your grandfather, mulberry tree of your father, your vine.” Today, we see thousand-year-old olive trees uprooted from their birthplace to ornament roundabouts in town. We are so committed to immediacy that we want to apply it to nature. To plant a tree is work; it’s care; it’s money. But above all, it’s a lot of pleasure. To watch it grow, to attach it to a stake, to prune it to give it a form, to accompany it so it becomes large, to imagine it at maturity, when we’ll no longer be there - these are a lot of things that can appear futile for some (surely for the dickhead who came to incinerate the trees that I planted five years ago) but which represent a lot for me.

So what to do? Abandon the effort? Of course not. When someone burned my flowers in the springtime, I said that that next year I’d plant kilometers of rows of flowers… And indeed as much as it displeases some, we’ll continue next autumn to plant trees around the vines. And it’s with pleasure that we’ll share this love for nature with you when you come visit us.

- Jean-François Coutelou

Note published on Facebook, August 4th, 2016.