The Botanist and the Vintner
Every wine enthusiast knows the story: In the last quarter of the 19th century a then-unknown pest devastated Europe's vineyards, France's especially. Scientists of the time named the aphidian creature Phylloxera vastatrix. The insects arrived as stowaways on American vines shipped to Europe, and the only cure was to graft European Vitis vinifera vines onto resistant American roots to create a compound organism. To this day, most of the world's wines are grown from these odd chimerae.
That's the basic story, a simple case of a pest brought to a defenseless ecosystem. But of course it's much more complicated than that, as Christy Campbell describes in The Botanist and the Vintner. In a sense, politics and pride left Europe as vulnerable as its vines. Few believed that the pest could invade their noble vineyards; most attributed the destruction to poor vineyard management in the afflicted areas. And fewer still wanted to use American rootstock once scientists suggested that solution; opponents feared that the notorious "foxiness" of American grape species would afflict the noble aromas of Vitis vinifera. The French government attacked instead with chemicals. It was an understandable attitude given the reputation of French wines, but the ineffective approach gave the tiny aphid carte blanche to wriggle its way through the ground from vineyard to vineyard. A rare winged form (rare on vinifera vines, anyway) could fly a much greater distance.
Those who believed the aphid wouldn't affect them were proven wrong, and the government's chemical attack accomplished little but draining the country's coffers. The single most striking part of Campbell's book is the pair of maps at the very beginning. One shows phylloxera penetration in France in 1875, a small set of light gray splotches. The next shows France in 1894, painted with the dark gray he labels as "Totally phylloxerated." With virtually all of France's vineyards withered and dead, "the American option" was the only choice left (phylloxera itself was not the killer; like AIDS it simply lowered the vine's defenses to other attacks).
Campbell then brings the battle to modern times. A poorly wrought rootstock hybrid from UC Davis proved vulnerable to phylloxera, to the dismay of those California growers who embraced the new roots. And phylloxera adapted to be even more voracious than before. High-tech equipment now helps track phylloxera's spread, but to this day there is no effective chemical defense against the minuscule marauder. Genetic engineering, says Campbell, may finally provide the answer, and perhaps even allow vinifera rootstock to be used once again if the genes that marshal American vine defenses can be inserted into vinifera. Those who have tasted wines from ungrafted vines pronounce them smoother and more refined than the equivalents produced by the grafted vines. But will consumers accept transgenic wines? That is a much different debate.
The writing in the book evokes Simon Winchester. Sometimes that's bad, as Campbell seems to have acquired Winchester's tendency to end chapters with sentences like, "Professor Planchon was about to find out for himself" or "The botanist was horribly correct." The story is compelling enough without a little hook seemingly tacked to the end of every chapter. But mostly this writing kinship is good, as the erudition one sees in Winchester's books can be found here as well. Campbell does a good job of placing the struggle in its historical context, including the fact that the controversy around Darwinism made people slow to accept an obvious explanation for American vinous resistance. He also talks about how phylloxera changed the European wine landscape. It paved the way for the massive flow of wine that hemorrhages out of the Languedoc and Midi; it allowed vintners in Sancerre to replace the Pinot Noir that dominated the appellation with the Sauvignon Blanc that makes it famous today. Many vineyards were simply left abandoned. New safeguards went into place as English drinkers became suspicious about wines purportedly from a place that had stopped producing. It's interesting to see how the disaster created our modern view of wine.
For anyone fascinated by history and wine, this is an enjoyable book that sheds light into what is probably the single most important event in 19th century wine making, an event that still shapes our universe today.
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