There are many dangers when someone moves from the city to the country, but smelly horses aren't the first thing that springs to mind.
However, that is exactly the issue at the heart of a legal battle in Alsace that has been dragging on for five years, much to the chagrin of the horse's owners, the family-owned Valentin Zusslin domain, which has been making wine in Orschwihr, southeast of Colmar since 1691. It produces wines from three different vineyards, including the Pfingstberg Grand Cru, which has been producing wine since 1299.
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The estate has been biodynamic since 1997 and the flaxen-maned chestnut comtois – called Sesame – has been helping out at harvest time. And therein lies the trouble – it usually lives in a meadow bordering a neighboring property, where it lives happily and trots around, its fetlocks blowing in the wind. The owner of the neighboring property has taken the Zusslins to court, claiming that the smell of the horse and the number of flies it attracts is harming their holiday-rental business.
An online petition was started by Brussels resident Remy Boissert to persuade the appeal court in Colmar to throw out the case, citing the well-known advantages of using horses in the vineyard – better soil, zero pollution and so on – as well as appealing to tradition.
"More and more winegrowers, especially organic, biodynamic or natural, are using an external organisation for their horse-powered work or have their own horse, for which they have built a shelter and placed on a pasture on their farm," he said in his petition.
"But more and more often, these winegrowers face ... regulations far too restrictive for a single animal, or neighbors that feel annoyed by the presence of a horse and that go to court to make him disappear. Those are the same persons, often neo-rural, who dream of a sanitized countryside, without smell, without insects, without cockerels, without bells."
The neighbor lost the initial case in the Alsace courts, but went to the appeal court to argue that the smell and the flies made life "impossible" for his clients and also argued that the horse wasn't necessary, as the vineyards could be harvested by machine. He also argued that "there are many organic winegrowers who do not own a horse".
Horses were once an integral part of the vineyard in France, but increased mechanization in the post-war period saw their presence diminish. However, recent years have seen a renaissance in their use; indeed, there are so many working in the vineyards of Burgundy that books have been written about them.
Alfred Tesseron of Bordeaux's Château Pontet-Canet famously moved from tractors to horses 10 years ago, a move that saw other estates go the same way.
"Year after year, vineyard machinery has been growing more elaborate, more expensive and more comfortable for the people who use it," he said in an interview at the time. "The tractors now have stereos, air-conditioning. The machinery is much heavier. An impacted soil is a less natural soil. A less natural soil produces less healthy plants. Less healthy plants produce poorer grapes. We have decided to experiment by bringing back horses."
An increase in biodynamic and natural winemaking has also sparked fresh interest in vineyard horsepower.
And while some people might resent the presence of rural creatures in a rural setting, France as a country tends to come down pretty hard against those who complain that the countryside often smells or sounds a little too much like, well, the countryside.
Earlier this month a French court ruled that a rooster called Maurice could continue his dawn crowing despite complaints from neighbors, in a case that was presented cast a battle between the old rural way of life and modern values creeping in from the city.
One of Maurice's owners, Corinne Fesseau, told Reuters the court in Rochefort, western France, rejected a demand from the neighbors that Maurice be silenced.
"Today Maurice has won a battle for the whole of France," said Fesseau.
Maurice, a 4-year-old rooster, lives on a small island off France's Atlantic coast. His crowing irritated a neighbor, Jean-Louis Biron, who is from the city and bought a second home next door to Maurice's owners. Biron brought the court case.
Similar court cases against cows and church bells have been filed in France but none with the same emotive impact as Maurice the rooster, who elicited letters of support from as far away as in the United States, Reuters reported.
If you would like to show some support for Sesame, you can sign the petition here.
