The Great French Wine Blight

"Wine, sex and baths ruins our bodies but they are the stuff of life--wine, sex and baths," reads a 1^st 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.

Similar disasters were reported from surrounding Rhone villages. In 1866, an outbreak was reported from the Bordeaux region, home to many a premier crus. So it continued. Vineyard owners were horrified. There seemed no way to stop the plague, whatever it was. Finally, in 1868, the mystery was, quite literally, rooted out. It was solved by a trio of scientists Université Montpellier in southeast France, one of the world's oldest universities. Jules-Emile Planchon, director of the botany department, had gained experience at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. Nothing if not practical, a man of his hands he dug up vines to expose what was responsible. The roots were crawling with a tiny, lemon-yellow parasite, closely related to aphids. Commonly known as grape phylloxera or vine louse, it has been classified in the Order Hemiptera or True Bugs. A complicated life cycle of up to 18 stages makes control extremely difficult, as unfortunate French grape growers discovered. Worse still, in an ultimate insult to French sensibilities, female phylloxera can and do engage in sexless reproduction. Technically referred to as parthenogenesis, it is all too common for many of their Hemipteran cousins. Loaded with eggs, a female lays them on a Vitus vinera leaf during summer, prompting the outbreak of all-too-visible blisters. When these eggs hatch, the females crawl on to the vine stems. There each lays up to 600 overwintering eggs. Come spring, these in turn hatch and, as Stephen Clarke has described it, "a mass of wingless yellow aphids were born and stampeded down to the root, which they demolished like English tourists at a drink-all-you-can beach bar." Having destroyed their host, the replete phylloxera then move on to victims in other vineyards.

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The French had not seen such destruction since the Hundred Year's War

The French had not seen such destruction since the Hundred Year's War. And it wasn't just the French. By 1880, every European vineyard was threatened. A decade later 40 percent of French grape vines were dead and wine production had slumped. Yet a quarter-century after it had been first identified, no control seemed possible. The answer, when it came, arrived from the country that had delivered the pest. It had also been paid for it--quelle horreur! As early as the 1850s, some French vintners had been experimenting with rootstocks obtained from catalogs in the United States. The horticultural practice of grafting has been known since at least Ancient Greek times. It appeared that certain French vintners were experimenting to improve their vines in this manner, amongst them Bordeaux growers Gaston Bazille and Léo Laliman. Two decades later, in the 1870s, the Missouri-based English entomologist Charles Valentine Riley noted that American grape plants harbouring the vine louse seemingly remained unaffected and productive. He sent samples of these American rootstocks to Jules-Emile Planchon at Université Montpellier. He confirmed Riley's findings. Working with Bazille and Laliman he also discovered that grafting French vines onto phylloxera-resistant American rootstocks rendered them immune. Eureka! French vines and wines could be saved!

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Wait! This is La Belle France! Ignoring all evidence, many growers opted to continue spraying their declining vines with chemicals. Those that chose grafting were labelled "wood merchants." Still, even a French vintner couldn't resist indefinitely. It was either graft onto American rootstocks or, gulp, no cru. Soon," wrote Stephen Clarke, "a Franco-American army of liberation was marching across the country." Not all rootstock strains are equally resistant. Indeed, in recent years this has brought disaster to some Californian vineyards. Since phylloxera has spread globally though, the only answer is grafting. Almost all the wine produced today, even if from French cultivars, is a blend: Franco-American. There are a few glorious exceptions. Protected by the Andes, Chilean wines are still derived from grapes produced from vines growing on their own roots. Small areas remain phylloxera-free in France, Spain, Italy and Sicily, California, and several areas in Western and South Australia. This is attributed to different soils in which the pest cannot, for now at least, thrive. Hélas! Le pauvre Planchon! Assuming he had unearthed a new insect previously unknown to science, in 1868 he officially named it Phylloxera vastatrix. Unfortunately he had been beaten by the distinguished American entomologist Dr. Asa Fitch (1809-79). Over a decade earlier, in 1855, Fitch had identified the pest as Daktulosphaira vitifoliae. Worse yet for Planchon, it is Fitch's name that appears, as is scientific practice, in parenthesis following the formal name he bequeathed it.