Organic wine on the rise in France

Organic wine is gaining ground in France where a Bordeaux Sauternes "grand cru", the highest classification level, has just been awarded the official biological farming (AB) logo.

Chateau Guiraud 2011 will be the first of the region's top Sauterne wines to carry the logo, some 15 years after one of its owners, Xavier Planty, first started to experiment with organic farming.

The sweet white wine -- made from a mixture of semillon and sauvignon blanc grapes -- has been grown for hundreds of years in this southwestern French region, but production today involves neither artificial pesticides, nor fertilisers, nor herbicides. It all started in 1996 when Planty decided he was fed up with the constant chemical treatment of his cornfields and of his own private 15 hectares (37 acres) of vineyards.

Two years earlier, a friend of his who spent his whole life treating fields with chemicals had died of cancer. So Planty decided "to work differently".

He started off with a 12-hectare (29 acres) vineyard to "learn the ropes" and suffered a number of setbacks.

But working alongside an agricultural engineer, he began to "regenerate the soil" with liquid manure to replenish the grassy vegetation that grows naturally around vine stock. AFP