I'll Drink to That (10 page)

By 1876, phylloxera was generalized throughout the Beaujolais, and the stock of rationalizations was exhausted. The huge winegrowing region of Bordeaux was already hit, and Burgundy was the next in line, then the vineyards of Italy, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Hungary and other lands—in short, wherever
Vitis vinifera
was growing, even, in time, California and as far away as Australia. More deadly over its twenty-year infestation than the black plague had been for human beings, phylloxera made a tabula rasa of Europe’s traditional wine industry. Not since the terrible winter of 1709 had vignerons known such a catastrophe. In that awful year—which had been bookended by preceding and following winters of nearly equal severity—the entire continent shivered in Siberian temperatures, and crop loss caused widespread starvation. In the wine regions, vines froze solid in the arctic air. Most of France’s vines died and had to be pulled up and replanted the following spring; the small numbers that survived were saved only by the drastic surgery of amputation at ground level. Eventually, after a harvestless year or two, the roots gave new shoots and the vines were reborn.

There was no such remedy against phylloxera. Quite simply, no one had any notion of how to kill or control the bug. A long, agonizing period of grasping at straws now took over the Beaujolais, just as it had done earlier in the Midi. Sensibly enough, botanists advised selecting only the healthiest of seedlings to plant in place of dead vines, while thoroughly preparing the ground to receive them and boosting their resistance with potassium-based fertilizers, but heartier young vines only provided the intruders with more nourishing sap. It had already been established that certain southern owners had managed to save half or more of their average crops by physically flooding their vineyards for a couple of months in late autumn, thereby drowning the parasites, but the system was obviously futile for anything but flat, low-lying terrain, and out of the question in the hills and slopes of the Beaujolais. When Raclet’s old boiling water method gave no result, peasants were reduced to the heartbreaking task of attempting to physically remove the aphid eggs by hand, in a grotesquely laborious process that involved digging deeply around the vines and cleaning trunks and roots one by one with a chain-mail glove. Although largely useless, the glove at least had the advantage of being cheap, and for a few illusion-filled years it was widelydisseminated among winegrowers. Several steps above that were the considerably more expensive high-tech devices of the period like the “injector rod” of the ingenious inventor Victor Vermorel. The apparatus resembled a giant clyster, and featured a cylindrical storage tank, two handles and a foot pedal for squirting carbon disulfide, an industrial solvent, into the ground around the roots. Some minor success had been reported with this compound as an insecticide, and for a few years the government even awarded subsidies for its use, but, like the potassium sulfur carbonate treatments earlier certified by the Ministry of Agriculture, it had the unfortunate side effect of killing the vine along with the insects in anything stronger than light, carefully calculated doses. Vermorel’s company also put a “sulfur plow” on the market for delivering an underground stream of carbon disulfide, but the device was expensive and the chemical treatment was highly toxic to the human nervous system, easily flammable and explosive. Beaujolais old-timers used to recount stories heard from their elders of muddle-headed vignerons unthinkingly lighting up for a cigarette break after a few hours with the Vermorel plow or injector rod, and expiring in a horrible, self-inflicted inferno.

The usual prayers, masses and pilgrimages only underlined the degree of disarray that had overcome the winemaking community. For want of anything better, folk and artisanal methods cropped up in patches wherever human imagination sought out the give-it-a-try approach. At the suggestion that the chemical composition of urine might be a palliative, one enterprising army unit in a Lyon suburb diligently collected tanks of horse pee to be ladled out over the vines, and one Beaujolais schoolteacher was reported to have led his schoolboys out of the classroom at recess time to earnestly
faire pipi
in military formation on adjacent vine rows. (For understandable reasons of reigning tenets of modesty, only “masculine urine” was deemed useful for this cure.) The French being a race of inveterate home inventors and undiscovered Thomas Edisons, a vast range of more or less plausible procedures, powders, liquids and chemical compounds—petroleum, viscous tar, sea salt, electricalcharges—was proposed and sometimes tried out on the unfortunate vines, all to no avail. Campbell, who went to heroic lengths of research to discover a whole thesaurus of other suggested remedies, enumerated a selection that ranged from snail slime (“rich in calcium”) to jellyfish, lard, mustard, turpentine, nicotine, asparagus, parsley, dynamite blasts, marching bands to “drum the aphids out of their underground fastness” to something called a beating wheelbarrow, its mechanical mallets presumably driving the little parasites to distraction by its maddening, endlessly repeated thumping.

As the search went on for a way to stop the deadly bug, French wine production plummeted. In consequence, the decade 1880-1890, and even beyond, was an excellent time to be a seller, if you had wine to sell of course. Those who had laid in good stocks did very well for themselves, and indeed, phylloxera was something of a backhanded benediction for the big wine dealers, who had no trouble at all in unloading even their mediocre reserves. Of course Beaujolais peasants also commanded good prices for their last remaining barrels and sold high, retaining only a strict minimum of bottles for themselves, in case of medical emergency. Wine imports rose dramatically—Italy, Spain and Algeria would still be producing for a while—and, inevitably, ersatz wines soon made their appearance. To the old peasant wine-replacement recipes invented in times of dearth (mostly local fruits and herbs infused in water and boosted with a jolt of pure alcohol) a more up-to-date, scientifico-commercial approach now yielded industrial amounts of fake wine and wine replacements. A common process was to bathe imported Greek and Turkish raisins in warm water for ten days, color the liquid with various essences, some natural, some not, and, to lend a winy bite, with tartaric acid, preserving the result with a dose of sulfur. Far from being back-shed moonshine, the stuff was advertised and sold in the most respectable shops. Three million hectoliters of raisin wine were manufactured in France in 1890 alone.

Professor Garrier of Lyon University told me of an even more crooked product: “sugar wine.” This one didn’t require any grapes at all, fresh or dried: a mixture of beet sugar, water, tartaric acid and colorings created a drink at eight degrees of alcohol content after yeasts interacted with the sugar. The product could even be dressed up in regional styles by the addition of different synthesized essences like “Bouquet of Pommard, Old Bordeaux, Dried Extract of Bordeaux” or “caramel-malaga” for white wine. Although this was clearly chicanery, it doesn’t seem to have been prosecuted with excessive zeal. France was thirsty, and a lot of make-do solutions were more or less tolerated for want of clear laws and instruments for enforcing them. Five million hectoliters of sugar wine were on the market around 1890, Garrier reported in one of his papers, and it was not until 1908, after violent riots and demonstrations by winegrower unions, that this unlovable ersatz was finally put out of business via the simple expedient of a heavy new tax on sugar.

These had been terrible times for France. The country was still recovering from the disastrous war of 1870, which had cost it Alsace-Lorraine (a lot of good wine lost there), the imperium of Napoléon III and a breathtaking quantity of gold in war reparations that had to be handed over to Bismarck’s triumphant Prussians. In this unsettled period the political scene of the newborn Third Republic was a roiling theater of passionate debate and controversy, but even with all that the phylloxera scourge continued to be one of the biggest ongoing news stories of the day. French gourmets and politicians did not take lightly to drinking factory-made substitutes, and returning to the genuine product of nature had become a national priority. But how to beat the bug? Once the crackpot proposals had been eliminated, the various investigative and defense committees in the front lines of the struggle soon divided up into three camps: the
sulfuristes
, the
immersionistes
and the
américanistes
. Sulfur compounds had been rewarded with only partial success, and the applications had to be frequently repeated, always attended by the danger of killing the vine by ill-calculated overdose. Immersing vineyards in water staved off total crop failure, but the process was complicated, expensive and practicable only in flat areas near rivers or lakes. The American solution was the last choice, and by far the most controversial.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, American and French wine growers had shown a lively interest in each other’s native plants, and it was in all innocence that a certain number of American vines had been imported into France and planted for trials. They thrived, but within a couple of years the native
Vitis vinifera
growing nearby developed ugly leaf blisters and began to slowly perish. By 1869, investigators had made the obvious connection: it was these American vines that had brought a new kind of pest with them from the New World. At the same time, though, a capital characteristic of the imported vines was staring everyone in the face:
they were immune to the aphid themselves.
How this immunity had originated was unknown, but there it was, an inescapable hard fact. Investigators could only assume that over thousands or millions of years of natural selection and adaptation, the vines had developed protective mechanisms that permitted them to remain healthy under the bug’s attack, while Europe’s
Vitis vinifera
, virgin and defense-less, was easy prey.

Upon the discovery that the culprit was U.S. vines, the first panicky reaction was to embargo any further imports, but the ban was clearly pointless: the damage had already been done; the plague was there, and it was inching unstoppably through the land. It did not take long for a second thought, more logical this one, to replace the first: since the American vines were immune to phylloxera, why not try making wine with them? While the Beaujolais was enjoying its final two years of good harvests, winegrowers in the devastated Midi—or, rather, those who were wealthy enough to afford the expense—had already been replanting their ruined vineyards with strangely named vines from the New World: Jaquez, Cynthiana, Senasqua, Concord, Clinton, Cunningham, Scuppernong. Less fortunate vignerons simply gave up winemaking and turned to raising cattle or growing wheat or rye. The poorest of them suffered a fate similar to that of U.S. Okies. Ruined, their meager savings exhausted, they were reduced to becoming day laborers or moving on, elsewhere in France or in emigration to South America or Australia, where their descendants would be making wines a century or so later that would come into direct competition with those of the land they left behind.

When, in 1874, a specially convened wine congress sampled the first “American” wines produced from the newly planted southern fields, the verdict was unanimous: the stuff was revolting. From that big tasting came a disobliging but conveniently vague quip that went on to become one of oenology’s more popular idioms, one that is still in use today.
“Pissat de renard,”
someone said, by way of characterizing the wine: fox piss. But ever since, the sharp, indefinable aroma and taste of wines made from native American vines have been branded with the adjective “foxy” (
goût foxé
in French).

Clearly, then, the U.S. vines would not do as replacements for the cherished European
Vitis vinifera.
With that failed enterprise behind them, winegrowers turned to hybrids, crossing American and French stock in search of the holy grail, the “direct,” a single vine that would combine American phylloxera-resistance with the wine quality of
Vitis vinifera.
That ideal never materialized, but there was one hybrid, a crossing of two American stocks, that was received with great enthusiasm by small-time vignerons and farm families who made wine mostly for their own consumption, with perhaps a bit left over for sale to local bars and taverns: the Noah.

The saga of the Noah grape is one of the more interesting sidelights in the vast history of French winemaking. A rustic, hardy and easily raised plant named after history’s legendary first winemaker (remember the Genesis story of Noah planting vines after the flood, then getting disgracefully and nakedly drunk in his tent), it yielded abundant quantities of juice and seemed to possess every quality that a vigneron could desire, including a nicely high alcohol content when fermented. And it was versatile, too. It grew lustily in marginal “grain terrain,” and the white wine it produced could easily be turned to red by the simple expedient of mixing in a small dose of a powerfully colored red “tinting” wine, like the deep purple of another American grape, the Oberlin. In the stark, desperate years when the vineyards were dying and wine supplies were falling frighteningly short (a shortfall no doubt helped along by Prussia’s notoriously thirsty occupying troops), Noah promised a quick way to fill the pressing demand for everyday table and bistro wine. For want of any better solution, many French peasants planted it liberally in spite of its single great flaw: that abiding sin of American grapes, the foxy taste of its wine. But Noah was such a snap to cultivate, and so rich in juice, that it became the
cépage
of choice for many thousands of rural families. In time, they even managed to persuade themselves that the taste of the finished product,
ma foi
, wasn’t as bad as all that.

Noah vines thrived in private patches, then, but it was only after a generation of consumption that a second flaw came into evidence, and this one a good deal more serious: the wine did strange things to people. After a first few isolated cases began repeating themselves, it soon became clear that a lot of steady drinkers of Noah were going blind and even, in severe cases, falling into dementia. It was not until many decades had passed that analysis showed just what was going on: fermentation of the American hybrid produced psychotropic ethers, notably methanol, commonly known as wood alcohol, a violent toxin for the human nervous system. In 1930, the Noah vine was formally forbidden in France, a public health measure that paralleled the banning, fifteen years earlier, of the “green fairy,” absinthe, a drink credited with scrambling the brains of untold thousands of addicts (even if it seemed to have inspired some of the greatest art of Toulouse-Lautrec). The peasantry gave up their cherished Noah only with great reluctance, dragging their heels through the years and conveniently “forgetting” many a small family patch. Rumor persists that more than a few remain in private cultivation today.