Court-Noué in Champagne

A quiet vine virus that's changing vineyards - and wines

Wine media loves a good Champagne scare story. Champagne shortages, the (repeated) death of Champagne due to climate change, the rise of Prosecco….but what happens when vine growers are met with something that, unlike those challenges, appears essentially incurable?

Court-Noué, or fan-leaf virus, is a topic that pops up almost every time I visit Champagne. A 2018 survey of 230 vignerons undertaken by the University of Strasbourg reported 85% had encountered court-noué in their vineyards. It was rated the number two concern in terms of vine maladies, behind oidium (powdery mildew) but, slightly surprisingly, ahead of mildou (downy mildew - although one wonders whether that result would be the same given the downy mildew explosions of 2021 and spring 2024). Just over one third of vignerons reported a drop of yield of between 11% and 50% for court-noué-affected parcels.

Cramant, November 2022

The virus is carried from vine to vine by the nematode ‘Xiphenema’ (essentially a microscopic worm) in the soil, originating in contaminated vine stock when planted. Court-noué vines develop stunted growth, yellowing, lowering of bunch size, shot (or seedless) berries which ripen extremely fast, warped leaf shapes and - most crucially - small yields of very concentrated berries. Eventually, the vine is likely to perish. “The strange thing is that the wine can be nice”, explained Guillaume Doyard of the Vertus domaine, who makes use of this extra concentration to produce a still Coteaux Champenois from court-noué Chardonnay. “It depends what kind of wine you want to make - for concentration, for still wine, it’s good. For Champagne….”.

The Côte des Blancs is especially affected by Court-Noué, dotted all around the region but especially noted in villages such as Le Mesnil and Cramant. At Billecart-Salmon, Mathieu Roland-Billecart explained that fruit sourcing for the non-vintage blanc de blancs was looking more widely to areas such as the Vitryat not only because the Côte des Blancs is a heavily sought-after, limited-supply area, but because court-noué in some areas is making some of the classic villages too concentrated for the non-vintage style. A few weeks later, as I tasted with Aurelien Suenen in Cramant, a single parcel cuvée from heavily court-noué vines on the Mont Aigu in Chouilly was clearly, radically different from the other wines; not in a bad way, but deep, concentrated, vinous. Different.

I asked Jean-Phillipe Betrand, of Dom Pérignon’s viticultural team, about court noué. “The difficulty is that it creates a lot of heterogeneity in the vineyard”, he explained. “You might have some vines with court-noué that are extremely ripe and with high sugars, and the next normal. Short of going vine-to-vine, picking them individually, there’s not much you can do but to choose an ‘average’ - but this is not always the best route to quality”.