Survivor roots
In 1862 in the region of Roquemaure on the right bank of the Rhône, a wine merchant named M.Borty planted a few vines that came from the American continent. These were sent by his friend M. Carle, who unwittingly became responsible for the greatest viticultural disaster in the history of wine. In the two succeeding summers Borty's Grenache and Alicante plants began to turn yellow and gradually died out. It is estimated that by the end of the following decade 50% of the French vineyards were destroyed by an insect that was transferred by the American plants. Its name was phylloxera (dried leaf in Greek).
The book by Christy Campbell, Phylloxera, describes what followed in great detail. Various methods were proposed to deal with it. Efforts to eradicate and burn the plants were crowned with failure. In 1868, the botanist Jules-Emile Planchon identified a very small insect, only 3 mm in diameter, which was responsible for the disaster and had some kind of relationship with America. A few years later a Missouri entomologist discovered the insect in the roots of American vines and came to France to prove the correlation. In 1874, a decade after the first outbreak, there was still no solution to the problem. The French government offered a reward of 300,000 francs to anyone who presented an effective remedy. In the following year, grafting of vitis vinifera on American rootstocks started showing some promise. Finally, in 1884, the scientific community acknowledged that grafting on American vines was superior to the use of pesticides, which had proved to be a primitive and expensive way of dealing with the pest, at a cost of about 175.50 francs per hectare.
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