Wine Appreciation / Oenophiles

Technically you are not allowed to leave grapes on the vines within the Champagne AOC - it is one of the many rules. You can use a harvest machine to shake them off though, that's acceptable (not acceptable for the grapes used to make champagne, they have to be hand picked).

The restricted yield, on paper, allows growers to be more selective with their picking so you would keep the best and put the lesser one to the ground.

Our vineyards have organic credentials in France and we use no herbicides/ pesticides. We also manage grass between our rows and use no fertilisers.

It is a lot more labour intensive and it naturally lower the yield to about 10,000kg in a good year without straining the vines - thus getting a higher quality of grape.

So for us, it tends to balance out.

For others, who use herbicides/pesticides/a raft of fertilizer and prune "hard" in the winter, they would have achieve a yield of about 15 to 18,000kg this year so they would need to cut half of their grapes to the ground.

The Champagne AOC does not allow you to make other wines with surplus grapes so the best you'd do would be vinegard or hydro-alcoholic gel, which does not pay sufficiently to warrant doing so.

So all those producers have strained their vineyards and poisoned the ground for absolutely no reason this year.

But hey, Tesco and Aldi need Champagne at £12 per bottle so that's that - cut corners to get people what they want!