Phylloxera: By the mid-1860s, therefore, the French wine industry was enjoying a healthy recovery. The two main regions, Bordeaux and Burgundy, had introduced classification systems and quality control, Napoleon III’s government was showing active economic support, Louis Pasteur had established dramatically improved standards for the industry and, as a result of all this, the export market was growing rapidly to meet the insatiable demand by England’s expanding middle classes for Bordeaux wines.
It was at this precise moment that the wine industry was presented with its worst crisis ever—Phylloxera—and even the genius of Pasteur was no match for this new disease.
One of the reasons that the English and French were unable to grow vines in their American colonies was the existence of Phylloxera vastatrix (Daktulosphaira vitifoliae), a local North American aphid with an extraordinary sex-life which feeds on the roots of the Vitis vinifera and kills the vine. Phylloxera only existed east of the Sierra Nevadas, which is why the Spaniards had no problem growing wine on the West Coast in California. Native American vines had developed a resistance to Phylloxera over the centuries, but the European Vitis vinifera had no such resistance.
In 1862, a wine merchant named Borty in the southern Rhône valley planted ten experimental rows of some Native American grapevines within his walled garden in the small village of Roquemaure. The vines had been mailed to him by a friend in New York, and by the following summer, while the New American vines were thriving nicely, all M. Borty’s Grenache and Alicante vines were showing symptoms of a mysterious infection. Very soon, all the vines in the surrounding villages were either dead or dying, and by the mid-1860s all the vineyards of the southern Rhône valley had mysteriously died. A few years later all the vineyards in Burgundy were dead, and by the 1870s all the vineyards of France were under attack. (Unfortunately, France itself was also under attack. France in 1871 had been defeated in the Franco-Prussian War; German troops occupied France, and Paris itself was under the violent control of the Commune.) The mysterious plague spread to Italy by 1875, Spain by 1878, Germany by 1881, and Greece by 1898. By the end of the nineteenth century, all the vineyards in Europe had been destroyed. When the vineyards of Bordeaux were destroyed in 1869, the wealthy vineyard owners moved to the Rioja area of Northern Spain, and were able to grow their vines there for several years until the Phylloxera aphid finally reached them, nine years later. Eventually, the Phylloxera blight travelled all over the world, as far as Australia and South Africa by the start of the twentieth century, and in the 1990s almost destroyed the Californian wine industry.
The demand for wine still needed to be satisfied, and Europe began importing wines from California and even from Chile. As we shall see later, Californian wines developed a poor reputation in the twentieth century following Prohibition, but previously, in the late nineteenth century, they had been highly regarded and won all sorts of international prizes.
The Phylloxera aphid was not identified as the cause of the problem until the late 1870s, and the solution to the problem was not widely accepted until the late 1880s. The solution was to replant all the vineyards in Europe with the Phylloxera-resistant American Vitis riparia rootstock, and then to graft whatever remaining European Vitis vinifera vines could be found onto the roots. The replacement of rootstock did not begin until the 1890s, with the result that almost every vine in Europe today is grown on American rootstock. A wonderful study of France’s Phylloxera scourge and its eventual defeat can be found in Christy Campbell’s compellingly fascinating book, The Botanist and the Vintner – How Wine was Saved for the World.
Small pockets of vineyards around the world managed to survive Phylloxera; for example, it never reached Chile, and there are individual vineyards in Southern Australia, Piedmont, Italy, and Southern Portugal which were not affected and still have the original un-grafted vines. In most cases, the vines appear to have been protected by sandy soils. The Champagne house Bollinger owns two unaffected vineyards with original, un-grafted Pinot Noir vines, which they use to produce one of the rarest and by most accounts greatest of all Champagnes, Vieilles Vignes Françaises.
Of course, many traditionalists complained that wine never tasted the same again and that the new vines grafted onto American rootstock have an inferior, if not “foxy,” taste. Indeed, Benjamin Wallace’s entertaining The Billionaire’s Vinegar describes a whole culture of wealthy collectors who only drink wines bottled prior to the Phylloxera scourge.
Long-term effects of Phylloxera on the wine industry were mixed. Because every vineyard had to be laboriously and expensively replanted, more rational planning went into the layout of the vineyards and the choice of vines to be planted, resulting in greater efficiency. But many vineyards, and indeed many wine growing regions, lacked the financial ability to replant their vines, and so never recovered.
A good example is Chablis, which through much of its history had produced the most-valued and highly-regarded white wines in France. Grown in Yonne, in the northern reaches of Burgundy, the wines could be shipped down the Seine to the great markets of Paris. Unfortunately, the advent of the French railway system occurred the same time as the Phylloxera blight, and when it came time to replant the vineyards of Chablis, the winegrowers of the Yonne discovered that history had abandoned them beside the road. With direct rail links from Bordeaux, Dijon and Lyon, Paris had no further need for the wines of Chablis which, without a railway line, still needed to be transported the old-fashioned way by river.
An Interesting Decade: Altogether, the 1860s proved to be an eventful decade for French wine. To misquote Marcel Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes: “It started well but ended badly.”
1855 – Napoleon III orders the classification of Bordeaux wines
1861 – Classification of Beaune
1862 – M. Borty plants some American vines in his garden in Provence
1866 – Pasteur’s Etudes sur le Vin published
1867 – Most vineyards in Southern France appear to be dying
1870 – French government offers 30,000FR prize for a cure to Phylloxera
1871 – Proust born. France invaded and defeated by Prussia. Napoleon III abdicates. Phylloxera continues to destroy French vineyards
Twentieth Century
Prohibition: Founded by Puritans, the USA has always had a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards alcohol—and sex, too. It’s a nation torn between cheap whiskey and rough whore-houses on one hand, and root beer and Mother’s apple pie on the other. The long tradition of temperance movements finally culminated in the 1919 Volstead Act which, for the next fourteen years, banned the sale, production, and transportation of all intoxicating liquids. A minor loophole permitted some wineries, such the Christian Brothers, to continue making limited amounts of wine for Catholic priests to celebrate Mass, and a more significant and pernicious loophole allowed the production, sale, and consumption of unfermented grape juice.
Of the three major consequences of Prohibition, two are well-known and well-documented. Because the consumption of alcohol became illegal, people did their drinking in ”speakeasies.” Both for reasons of social ambience as well as economics, speakeasies encouraged the consumption of hard liquor rather than fine wines. Because the hard liquor was often of poor quality or worse, a tradition of cocktail-mixes arose to disguise the taste. During the fourteen years of Prohibition, therefore, Americans developed a taste for cocktails and spirits. It should not be forgotten that since the earliest colonial times, the inability to successfully produce local wine had encouraged Americans to drink locally produced hard liquor, rather than expensive, imported European wines.
Secondly, because alcohol became illegal, those Americans who were not strict teetotalers were forced to break the law and support an underground economy controlled by criminals, leading to the establishment and rapid expansion of organized crime, which remained entrenched in society even after the repeal of the 18th Amendment in 1933.<
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But a lesser known effect of Prohibition was the destruction of the highly-regarded Californian wine industry. California had been developing a wine industry since the Spanish missionaries started planting vineyards in the eighteenth century; by the late nineteenth century, Californian wines were competing successfully with the best European wines. Indeed, when the European vineyards were decimated by the Phylloxera plague in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was Californian wines that saved the day. When Prohibition was introduced in 1920, California had a successful and sophisticated wine industry with well-tended vineyards planted with a wide variety of the best European Vitis vinifera vines.
Because of the loophole that allowed the production, sale, transportation, and consumption of grape juice, a large percentage of the population started making their own wine. Jugs of grape juice were soon being distributed all over America, with labels containing very detailed instructions of what NOT to do in case the juice began to ferment and turn into wine. Consumers were instructed at what temperature they should NOT store their juice, and for how long they should be careful NOT to store it at that temperature—least they should inadvertently turn their innocent juice into alcohol. Home winemaking became so big and blatant during Prohibition that it threatened the revenues of organized crime, and was banned by Al Capone in Chicago on pain of death (literally).
Ironically, the demand for crude grape juice became so high that the land value of vineyards sky-rocketed during Prohibition, but unfortunately the quality of the grape juice plummeted. Vineyards boasting the finest, most mature Vitis vinifera vines were torn up and replanted with crude but prolific varietals, such as Alicante-Bouschet, that produced the juice the market demanded; quality was replaced with quantity.
After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, after thirteen years, ten months and eighteen days, Californian vineyards—which had been among the world’s best—were capable of producing only the crudest of cheap jug wines for a national market that was interested only in hard liquor anyway. That is the real tragedy of Prohibition, and it took another forty years to recover.
Some of the effects of Prohibition unfortunately continue to haunt Americans even today. American wine drinkers in the twenty-first century are still constrained by the three-tier system of distribution. This system, which was introduced with the repeal of Prohibition, means that wineries can sell only to distributors, and distributors can sell only to retailers or restaurants. This means there are always two layers of price mark-up between producers and consumers. Part of the reason for this was to increase the retail price of alcohol to prevent public drunkenness, and another reason was to fragment the industry so that organized crime could not dominate it.
Although Prohibition has long been repealed, public drunkenness is no longer the social scourge it once was, and organized crime has moved onto more lucrative ventures, the three-tier system is probably here to stay. There are too many vested interests benefiting from its complex regulations, too many lobbyists campaigning for its continuance, and too many state and local politicians guzzling from the financial trough into which it pours. Each of the fifty states has complete control over the distribution of alcohol within the state, and it is difficult to imagine a day when a state’s politicians would willingly relinquish control of so lucrative a system. Each state has its own conflicting set of regulations, most of which have not yet been tested in a court of law. There are many competing interests and players in the marketing of wine. With annual US sales of more than $21.6 billion from more than 3,700 wineries nationwide, wine is big business and lobbies on both sides have major interests at stake. Wholesalers want to retain the three-tier system for their livelihood, while wineries want all fifty states to open the door to direct shipping.
Despite the emergence of flash sale websites and the online marketplace with companies like Amazon offering price-saving possibilities, the archaic, Prohibition-era regulations will continue to make it difficult for a Florida resident from contacting her favorite Californian winery and ordering a case of her favorite wine at a fair market price. In any other business, if you found a way to effectively and profitably eliminate the middle distribution level, you’d be considered a business wizard. In the alcoholic beverage industry, you’ll be considered a criminal.
Judgment of Paris: Although most Californian vineyards had been uprooted during Prohibition and the wine industry destroyed, a few dedicated vintners had enough faith in the region to try and revive its fortunes. With the assistance of the University of California at Davis, new, more scientific methods were introduced into the growing of vines and the winemaking process until, by the early 1970s, the improved reputation of Californian wines had even reached Europe.
In 1976, Steven Spurrier, a young Englishman who ran an extremely successful wine shop in Paris, decided to honor the bicentennial of US independence with a blind tasting of French and Californian wines. Spurrier made an astute and well-informed selection of hitherto unknown Californian Chardonnays and Cabernets, which he matched with the very best French wines from Burgundy (including two Grand Crus), and Bordeaux (including two Premier Crus). (The complete list is shown in Appendix I.)
The judges were not only all French; they were also the crème de la crème of the French wine industry. Everybody, including Spurrier, expected the French wines to win, and at best expected the Californians to get a condescending pat-on-the-head, be told their wine showed great promise, and maybe, in a couple of hundred years… The purpose of the event was to make a gallant, Gallic gesture in celebration of American Independence, and also to promote Spurrier’s wine store and to cement his relations within the French wine establishment. In the event, Spurrier was almost drummed-out of France!
Not only did the Californian Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon out-perform all the French red wines—including Haut-Brion and Mouton Rothschild—but out of the top four wines in the Chardonnay category, three were from California, including Château Montelena, which got first place. It was a complete and publicly humiliating disaster for the French wine establishment. Full details of the tasting are given in George Taber’s wonderfully informative book, The Judgment of Paris.
The 1976 Paris tasting had significance and repercussions far beyond embarrassing the French wine establishment. By knocking France off its perch as the world’s supreme terroir for producing quality wine, the ’76 tasting opened up the rest of the world and conferred winemaking confidence on the other side of the Atlantic and on the other side of the equator. The lessons of the Paris tasting are best exemplified by Baron Philip de Rothschild.
Rothschild had inherited the Château Mouton estate in 1922. According to the 1855 classification, Château Mouton was rated as a Deuxieme Cru—a second growth. Rothschild’s theory was that it was not included in the top first growths only because, in 1855, the estate was owned by an Englishman. For the next forty years, Rothschild dedicated his life to having Château Mouton Rothschild elevated from second growth to first growth, and finally this was accomplished in 1973. Rothschild celebrated the event by having the estate’s motto changed from, “Premier ne puis, second ne daigne, Mouton suis” (First, I cannot be. Second, I do not deign to be. Mouton I am), and it was changed to, “Premier je suis, Second je fus, Mouton ne change” (First, I am. Second, I used to be. Mouton does not change).
Three years later, a panel of eminent French judges voted Château Mouton Rothschild second in the Paris wine tasting—second to Stag’s Leap, a previously unknown wine from California. Baron Philip was understandably furious and devastated. “It has taken me forty years to become a first growth,” he sobbed. But Rothschild was an extremely intelligent man, and he quickly learned his lesson. Within three years he had entered into an equal partnership with Robert Mondavi in California’s Napa Valley to produce the very successful 1979 Opus One Cabernet Sauvignon. Not only did Rothschild continue to purchase vineyards in California, but he sent his daughter to Chile to
partner with Concha y Toro, and now this French family has invested in vineyards all over the world. As George Tabor explains in his book, the Californians’ success in the Judgment of Paris demonstrated that the quality of the grapes and the skill of the winemaker are far more important than the place where the wine is made—however venerated its historic traditions. (See Appendix C for list of wines tasted in Paris and final votes.)
British Influence: For such a small rainy island, off the coast of Northern Europe with no vineyards worth discussing, Great Britain has had, and still maintains, an extraordinary dominance in the world of wine. Since the time the Romans first planted vineyards in Southwest France around the city they called Burdigala on the wide Gironde River to supply its legions in Britannia, the British have maintained a very close relationship with this port city of Bordeaux.
The Hundred Years’ War from 1337 to 1453 was essentially a struggle over the Bordeaux wine trade, and even after the French crown finally expelled the English armies and destroyed all English claims; the English trade, the English influence, and the English merchants still remained. Even today, British (and Irish) family names from that period still dominate the Bordeaux wine trade: Barton, Berry Bros, Johnston, Talbot, Lynch, Barges, Colks, and Lawtons, to name a few. As discussed elsewhere, even the distinctive Bordeaux style of wine—the claret—was developed to satisfy English tastes.
During those periods of war when English and French hostilities forced the English to look elsewhere for wine, the English developed close ties with Portugal, and even today, the wine trade in Oporto is still dominated by the English and Irish immigrants of the seventeenth century. The following list of current wine merchants in Portugal indicates this British heritage: Churchill, Cockburn Smithes, Croft, Dow, Gould Campbell, Graham’s, Harris, Hutcheson, Burmester, Morgan Brothers, Forrester, Osborne, Richard Hooper & Sons, Sandeman, Smith Woodhouse, Symington, Taylor, Grahamn, and Warre.
The Booklovers' Guide to Wine Page 11
