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Product Description
In the mid-1860s, grapevines in southeastern France inexplicably began to wither and die. Jules-Émile Planchon, a botanist from Montpellier, was sent to investigate. He discovered that the vine roots were covered in microscopic yellow insects. What they were and where they had come from was a mystery. The infestation advanced with the relentlessness of an invading army and within a few years had spread across Europe, from Portugal to the Crimea. The wine industry was on the brink of disaster. The French government offered a prize of three hundred thousand gold francs for a remedy. Planchon believed he had the answer and set out to prove it.
Gripping and intoxicating, The Botanist and the Vintner brings to life one of the most significant, though little-known, events in the history of wine.
Amazon.com Review
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
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