"Wine, sex and baths ruins our bodies but they are the stuff of life--wine, sex and baths," reads a 1st century AD Rome tombstone to former slave Tiberius Claudius Secundus by his wife Merope. Two millennia later, wine, at least in France, seemed en retraite. Blame a minute pest from eastern North America, rice-grain in size. It bears a name you might not wish to pronounce after a couple of glasses of vin rouge: Daktulosphaira vitifoliae.
It all began in spring, 1863 in a small French village in the Rhone valley near Nîmes. Grape leaves erupted in blisters, as if infected with some kind of pox. Much to the villager's relief, the spots fell off and the vines blossomed and produced grapes that autumn. The following season, however, quel désastre! The harvest was reduced and the wine virtually undrinkable. The third year saw the coup de grace. The vines shrivelled, died and their roots had turned black.
