Effets des pratiques agro-viticoles sur l’activité biologique et la matière organique des sols : exemples en Champagne et en Bourgogne

The notion of terroir covers multiple components, from geology, pedology, geomorphology and climatology (Doledec, 1995), to less well-identified aspects but also intervening in the “typicality” of wines. This justifies the “zoning” approach (Moncomble and Panigaï, 1990) to define homogeneous areas, under the same agro-viticultural management and also identified at the product level (Morlat and Asselin, 1992).

Cultivation practices form a component of the “terroir” which should not be neglected because it can be modified by human action. It is therefore necessary to know the consequences of the technical itineraries well, in order to be able to choose them according to the fixed data of the terroir and the desired characteristics of the product.

In this respect, soil maintenance techniques are certainly the most interesting to study, because of their interactions with water supply and vine nutrition. Such interactions have already been studied by viticultural monitoring (Soyer et al ., 1995; Aguhlon and Voile, 1995), but very little work has been devoted to direct measurements on the soil. This is what we have sought to do in the present work, relying on the experimental devices of Plumecoq and Montbré in Champagne and Mâcon-Clessé in Burgundy.

More broadly, our objective is to participate in promoting sustainable management of vineyard soils compatible with quality products. It is in fact a question of researching the most suitable cultural practices for:
1) conserve soils, in the face of “a worrying reactivation of erosion” (Roose, 1994)
2) control their characteristics linked to fertility (structure, organic reserves, biological activities, availability of nitrogen and water ).