Integrated pest management is a form of conventional viticulture (agriculture) which encourages growers to reduce or even eliminate completely certain vineyard sprays, treatments, and management practices used to control pests. This approach can benefit both the environment and the winery’s bottom line by, for example, re-calibrating spray machinery to avoid waste (spraying thin air), or timing treatments more accurately. IPM can be a useful first step towards organic or biodynamic methods. But it can become, in the words of the late Bobby Fetzer, wine’s equivalent of “giving up smoking on weekdays, but not at the weekends.”

IPM is called la lotta integrata in Italian, la lutte raisonnée in French.

Bibliography

Dr Richard Smart & Monty Waldin in the Oxford Companion to Wine 4th edition ed. Jancis Robinson MW and Julia Harding MW (Oxford University Press, 2015), p.374.