Dying on the Vine: How Phylloxera Transformed Wine

Chapter 3: La Reconstitution

79 By 1882 it was clear that La Défense had failed. As much as official Paris wanted to keep American vines out and traditional French practices in, it wasn’t going to happen. Defending traditional French practices against the American insect scourge was simply too expensive and ineffective in terms of time, environment, labor, and finance. Luckily, even as La Défense was being proclaimed from Paris, alternatives to it were being tried and tested in the provinces. These alternatives all involved vines from America in one way or another. American vines functioned in three roles: as direct producers, grown on their own roots to make wine;1 as graft stock for traditional grapevines; and as parents of genetic hybrids . Each role had its successes and its failures; in the end, decisions about which role to feature in a given vignoble rested upon an evaluation of the trade offs between aesthetics, economics, and biological viability . What made the decision so difficult in each case was the fact that “success” was a moving target. At first, when nearly every vigneron in a region was devastated, success simply meant surviving, making some wine for your family to drink, with perhaps a little left over to sell. Then, once that goal had been accomplished, and progress had been made in the university labs, at the research station, or in a private concern in the next arrondissement, success meant better wine, better production, or even production on pieces of your property that couldn’t grow the first wave of vines. chapter 3 La Reconstitution 80 | La Reconstitution By the 1890s the original tide of American vines—the direct producers and wild species rootstocks—had ebbed and the second wave was starting: genetic hybrids among American species and European grapes came into use in two roles. First, second-generation graft stocks, hybrid rootstocks,2 were being rapidly disseminated from the École in Montpellier and research stations in Bordeaux, the Charentais, and Provence. Among these graft stocks were candidates suitably adapted to almost every terrain in France and compatible with almost all the traditional varieties. But competing with the grafting campaign run by Montpellier was an alternative program emphasizing hybrid direct producers, an entirely new class of vines whose genetic foundation combined elements from both American and French varieties. This campaign’s theoretical base was the University of Bordeaux. In practice, however, many of the most valuable additions to the armamentarium of available hybrid direct producer varieties were developed by private individuals, most of whom were located in the southeast, particularly around Ardèche. Noisy conflict between the two hybridizing programs lasted for at least twenty years. But even then it didn’t go away; rather, it just got less noisy, even as it spread far beyond France. Indeed, it is quite fair to say that principals of the two sides are still vigorously competing after the turn of the millennium, more than a century later.3 The issues that divide the two camps are complex, subtle, and have deep roots, roots that are firmly embedded in the ever-opposed terrains of tradition and modernity. But let us begin in the Midi in the early 1870s, at the very start of the “period of direct production” (Sahut, quoted in Pouget 1990, 58). phase one: the american direct producers After two centuries and innumerable failed attempts to transplant European viticulture to their soil, Americans finally gave up and in the early 1800s turned to the wild vines growing everywhere in their forests . Beyond being quite evidently different from traditional European wine grapes, the wild vines exhibited a wild and confusing diversity all their own. In the Northeast, the wild grapes called “fox” grapes—for reasons opaque even today—produced large berries with tough skins and a unique taste. In the Midwest flourished the “riverbank” grape, the “bush” grape, and, in more southerly regions, the “sweet summer” grape.4 As the botanists began to sort out this plethora of vines, it wasn’t long before the realization sank in that America’s suite of grapes repre- La Reconstitution | 81 sented the richest treasure trove of species and varieties in the world (discussed in Appendix B).5 The question was how to take advantage of them to make decent wine? Practice overtook science from the very start. American grape enthusiasts of all kinds took to the woods in a search for vines to suit their interests...