[net.wines] Frances's Blight

marijoa (12/09/82)

Could someone give me the background on the time some grape vines were
sent over to France after a blight they had?  According to Merv Griffin
we literally saved their neck.

robertc@sri-unix (12/11/82)

*  Could someone give me the background on the time some grape vines were
*  sent over to France after a blight they had?  According to Merv Griffin
*  we literally saved their neck.


Well, this is actually a bad news, good news story.

First you need to know that most European grapes that we are
used to using for fine wines are members of vitis vinifera
(Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay to name two) and a number
of native American grapes used for table and wine are members
of vitis lambrusca.  In the mid-1870s Bordeaux and the rest of
Europe was infested by phylloxera, a long name for a root louse
that came from America.  The problem was that vitis vinifera
has very thin skin on the roots while vitis lambrusca has thick
skin on the roots and can coexist with phylloxera.  The bad news
is that the European vineyards were devastated and lost production.

The good news is that it was discovered that by using rootstock
from American vitis lambrusca vines and grafting cuttings from
the desired variety of vitis vinifera that the phylloxera
problem went away.  People of course said the new wines weren't
as good as the ungrafted type, but I'm neither old enough or
rich enough to have compared pre and post-phylloxera wines.
There are some areas of the US where the soil type is bad
for phylloxera or where no grapes have grown and therefore
there are no grape pests, which are planted in ungrafted
vitis vinifera vines.  Oregon has some of these sites.

So would California have considered it nice if a natural
predator to the medfly could have been imported to control it
after the infestation started?  I think they would have prefered
not having to have been saved in the first place.