Life Cycle Assessment helps addressing environmental burdens of organic viticulture ; L'Analyse du Cycle de Vie pour réduire l'impact environnemental de la viticulture biologique

International audience ; Background: Viticulture is very demanding in inputs. Organic viticulture is often seen as a sustainable system but has also environmental impacts. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is able to discriminate vineyard managements. Aims: Our study explores the interest of LCA to assess, compare and improve organic vineyard management routes through a comparison of information given by practices inventories, Life Cycle Inventories (LCIs) and LCA. LCA methodological challenges are also discussed. Material and methods: Eight cases were studied in three French wine regions and two years. LCI and Life Cycle Impact Assessments (LCIAs) were calculated, five impacts were selected by correlation (climate change, fresh water eutrophication, terrestrial ecotoxicity, terrestrial acidification, marine eutrophication). Results and discussion: Practices and quantity of inputs were contrasted among the cases. The study of impacts on climate change revealed the hierarchy of importance of operations and a different ranking of cases for the functional units Ha and Kg. The LCIAs showed major differences between cases for some impacts and their drivers. LCIA and LCI permitted to account for the life cycle dimension of the impacts and for the toxicity and persistence of pesticides. The challenges of organic vineyard LCA are to (i) better consider sulphur and copper, (ii) enrich databases on organic fertilizer, and (iii) build an LCA indicator of biodiversity impact. Conclusion: LCA is better than practices inventories and LCI to assess organic viticulture. ; Contexte : La viticulture est très exigeante en intrants. La viticulture biologique est souvent considérée comme un système durable, mais elle a des impacts environnementaux. L’analyse du cycle de vie (ACV) permet de discriminer les itinéraires viticoles. Objectif : Notre article présente et discute l’intérêt de l’ACV pour évaluer, comparer et améliorer les itinéraires viticoles biologiques par une comparaison (i) des inventaires des pratiques, (ii) des inventaires ...