Best Wine – The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World
Vintage Wine Shoppe Extra Tastings – Everything Alabama Blog
From Thursday March 18 – 22, the Spring Break Wine Sale will offer a 15% discount on cases of wine, mix or match, and a gift sale with most gifts at 25% off. Friday’s weekly tasting on March 19, from 5- 6:30 p.m. will feature “Spring Favorites.”
The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World
In the mid-1860s, after countless centuries of bearing the fruit that would become wine, French grapevines began to wither and die in ever increasing numbers and no one knew why. It started in southeastern France, in the Rhone Valley, as Christy Campbell tells the tale in his masterful The Botanist and the Vintner. Within 30 years the inexorable rolling disaster that was the phylloxera infestation had reached into every nook and cranny of France’s wine making regions, destroying nearly all. Everywhere the wine grape grew–England, Spain, Italy, Germany, Eastern Europe, and even Australia–phylloxera appeared and took no prisoners. Except for American grape vines. The little bug didn’t seem to have much taste for the skunky wines of native American grapes.
Christy Campbell, British journalist and, if The Botanist and the Vintner is any example, master storyteller, waltzes the reader into the middle of a fascinating tale of discovery and combat and never stops dancing. The book reads like a detective novel, a page-turner you can’t put down. And it’s about a bug, phylloxera, a root-sucking aphid that absolutely wiped clean the grand vineyards of France and thrived in defiance of both peasant remedy and all that “modern” science could bring to bear.
The modern science of the time, mind you, included debating Darwin’s new theory of evolution. So it’s really at the beginning of discovery and scientific technique. Despite a French government prize of 300,000 gold francs for a remedy, it took 30 years and more to pinpoint the reason for the vineyard die-off, and a practical way of defeating the organism. Grafting onto American rootstock – a rootstock that was the initial cause of the disaster – won the day though not the reward.
Campbell both begins and ends his tale in California’s Napa Valley, where phylloxera once again raised its nasty little head toward the end of the 20th century, about 100 years after the struggle in France. It cost millions of dollars to bring the bug to bear. But this time part of the solution turned in a transgenic direction which is, of course, a threat with a completely different vintage. –Schuyler Ingle
Customer Review: A threat to all wine
For 20 years in the mid-1800s phylloxera threatened the wine industry in Europe
Many botanists, entomologists and vintners played a role in identifying the phylloxera, studying its life cycle and devising a means to defeat it. Although he doesn’t get much credit in this book, T. V. Munson in the US was crucial in identifying louse resistant vines. Planchon, a professor at the prestigious Montpellier School of Pharmacy, gets credit for identifying the phylloxera aphid as the cause and for tracing its origins to the States.
The book is wonderful in describing Planchon’s efforts to convince French growers and scientists that the louse was responsible. It also is wonderful at tracing the differing responses of wine regions as they became infest with the louse.
The French government offered a large cash prize for a solution to the problem; “solutions” included exorcism, mesmerism, “electrical commotions”, marching bands, and a marvelous “beating wheelbarrow,” with hammers that would pound the soil. Serious consideration was given to an even more absurd solution: make wine from American grapes. The country-life correspondent for Le Temps, after attending a half-dozen tastings of American wines, reported that “not one of those who took part had the courage to empty his glass.”
Nonetheless, by grafting French vines on American roots, the louse was defeated. Despite my carping about how Munson is portrayed, this is an excellent wine history.
Robert C. Ross 2008
Customer Review: you don’t have to be an enologist
How refreshing to read a book about wine history that is not totally layperson, but not textbooky. Fascinating read about the history of the relationship between European and American vines and indeed, how wine was saved for the world. Anyone interested at all in wine should read this book.
