The vine killers: an eco thriller
After the Napoleonic wars ended in the early 19th century, trade among England, France and the rest of the globe resumed. Steamships that crossed the Atlantic in just over two weeks, moss packaging and the invention of a suitable “terrarium” all improved chances that plants might survive long sea voyages. Orchids from Brazil joined maize, tobacco, potatoes and grapes already making their way to Europe. But, writes Christy Campbell in “The Botanist and the Vintner,” “there were no barriers, no inspectorate, no concept of biological quarantine,” and in the 1840s, “things began to go wrong.”
The elaborate mystery of what almost caused the complete collapse of France’s wine industry -- indeed, what could possibly have doomed grapevines worldwide -- was a true-life detective story ripe for the writing.
In 1845, a “parasitic fungus” on grapevines from America spread in a British greenhouse. The blight soon showed up in Italy, Spain and southern France. Were wilting leaves and mold a cause or a symptom? And, even more puzzling amid this burgeoning disaster, why did American imports suffer yet survive?
Meanwhile, in the United States, Old World grapes flourished only west of the Rockies. Elsewhere, “the European grape-vine species, Vitis vinifera, had shriveled and died within a few years of transplanting. No one knew why. The soil itself seemed poisoned.”
With a writing style that makes intricate science both interesting and accessible, Campbell, a British journalist and author of two previous investigative books, explains that grapes are usually propagated by cuttings rather than seeds, meaning Europe’s vineyards were a “vast monoculture” of “genetically uniform material.”
In the mid-19th century, Louis Pasteur had not yet put forth his “germ theory of disease,” nor had Charles Darwin published his book proposing evolutionary adaptation.
Decades of painstaking research on both sides of the Atlantic would pass before botanists and vintners recognized that introducing a disease or a parasite for which a plant has not developed a resistance by natural selection results in inevitable, widespread devastation.
In France’s mid-19th century wine business, large and small producers alike knew only that their vines -- and with them, their livelihoods -- were dying. Was there too much rain? Did propagation from cuttings weaken plant vigor? Could iron from newfangled railroads have disturbed the soil? Were smoke and gas from locomotives, or “evil emanations” from telegraph lines, to blame?
“Crackpot remedies abounded,” Campbell writes, including “herbal bonfire smokes, douching the roots in brine, washing foliage with soapy water, distempering with bizarre chemical cocktails, planting potatoes among the wines to somehow draw away the poison. None worked.” Sulphur sprays, which had quelled caterpillar infestations in the 1830s, now kept the fungus in check only after great expense, time and labor.
In 1865, a brief “golden age” of wine production ended abruptly when a worse threat surfaced. The new villain was a tiny aphid, eventually named Phylloxera vastatrix (“dry leaf devastator”), and like the fungus, it had arrived on American botanical samples.
Ironically, the diseased vines that caused such havoc would one day provide the cure. As early as 1860, Campbell notes, Leo Laliman of Bordeaux proposed grafting healthy French cuttings onto tenacious American roots, which somehow tolerated the disease. Could this miraculous immunity beat the bug too?
Dividing his book into three parts appropriately called “Denial,” “Anger” and “Acceptance,” Campbell deciphers the whole decades-long Phylloxera saga: from identifying the aphid to understanding its complex life cycle, then finally devising a remedy.
In the 1850s, germs and genetics must have seemed like “atheistical hocus-pocus.” But by 1900, “virtually the whole of France” was infested. Chemicals and other “cures” had failed.
Large-scale graft plantings in Burgundy and Bordeaux began in 1890. France’s national wine harvest exceeded pre-Phylloxera levels for the first time in 15 years in 1893, at last convincing French winemakers that insecticide could never obliterate a New World pest to which Old World vines had never adapted.
To this day, outbreaks occur and research continues. Campbell’s account, an engaging ecological thriller, is science writing at its best.
Irene Wanner is a critic whose work has appeared in publications including the Seattle Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.
