A winemaker in France's Burgundy region appears in court Monday for refusing to use pesticides in his organic vineyard despite a government order, reports GlobalPost.
Environmentalists have backed his refusal but other local winemakers have denounced the support campaign around him as full of "falsehoods" and defended their practices.
Emmanuel Giboulot is being pursued by an arm of the agriculture ministry for not heeding a local directive in Burgundy's wine-growing Cote d'Or area to regularly treat vines against a leaf-hopping insect that causes an infectious disease called "flavescence doree".
The disease first appeared in 1949 in France's southwestern Armagnac region.
It then spread steadily, reaching the wine-producing areas of Cognac, Languedoc, northern and southern Rhone, the Loire Valley and Bordeaux.
There is no cure yet for the bacterial infection, which can kill young vines and greatly reduce the productivity of older ones.
After the discovery of the disease in Burgundy's Beaune region, the local administration last June ordered all vineyard owners in the Cote d'Or area to treat their vineyards with pesticides.
But Giboulot has doggedly defied the order and shunned pesticides on his 10-hectare (24-acre) estate straddling the Cote de Beaune, the southern part of the Cote d'Or that is home to the great names in Burgundy wine.
Read more of this AFP report published by GlobalPost.