A cartoon from Punch from 1890: The phylloxera, a true gourmet, finds out the best vineyards and attaches itself to the best wines.[1]
The Great French Wine Blight was a severe blight of the mid-19th century that destroyed many of the vineyards in France and laid waste to the wine industry. It was caused by an aphid that originated in North America and was carried across the Atlantic in the late 1850s. The actual genus of the aphid is still debated, although it is largely considered to have been a species of Daktulosphaira vitifoliae, commonly known as grape phylloxera. While France is considered to have been worst affected, the blight also did a great deal of damage to vineyards in other European countries.
How the Phylloxera aphid was introduced to Europe remains debated: American vines had been taken to Europe many times before, for reasons including experimentation and trials in grafting, without consideration of the possibility of the introduction of pestilence. While the Phylloxera was thought to have arrived around 1858, it was first recorded in France in 1863, in the former province of Languedoc. It is argued by some that the introduction of such pests as phylloxera was only a problem after the invention of steamships, which allowed a faster journey across the ocean, and consequently allowed pests such as the Phylloxera to survive the trip.
Eventually, following Jules-Émile Planchon's discovery of the Phylloxera as the cause of the blight,[2] and Charles Valentine Riley's confirmation of Planchon's theory, Leo Laliman and Gaston Bazille [fr], two French wine growers, proposed that the European vines be grafted to the resistant American rootstock that were not susceptible to the Phylloxera. While many of the French wine growers disliked this idea, many found themselves with no other option. The method proved to be an effective remedy. The "Reconstitution" (as it was termed) of the many vineyards that had been lost was a slow process, but eventually the wine industry in France was able to return to relative normality.
^Punch magazine, 6 September 1890.
^G. Bazille, J.-E. Planchon and Sahut (1868) "Sur une maladie de la vigne actuellement régnante en Provence" Archived 21 October 2015 at the Wayback Machine (On a disease of grapevines presently prevailing in Provence), Comptes rendus, 67 : 333–336.
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