At Home - Bill Bryson [151]
Forty percent of France’s vines were killed in fifteen years. Eighty percent were “reconstituted” through the grafting on of American roots. Among the general devastation were small, mysterious areas of apparent immunity. All the Champagne region was wiped out but for two tiny vineyards outside Reims, which for some reason successfully resisted infection and still produce champagne grapes from their original roots—the only French champagnes that do.
Phylloxera aphids from the New World had almost certainly reached Europe before, but would have arrived as little corpses, unable to survive the long sea voyage. The introduction of fast steamships at sea and even faster trains on land meant that the little pests could arrive refreshed and ready to conquer new territory.
The grape phylloxera originated in America and had killed off all attempts to introduce European vines onto American soils—a matter that had caused consternation and despair from French New Orleans to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and on through Ohio and the rolling uplands of New York. American vines were immune to phylloxera but didn’t make very good wine. Then someone realized that if you grafted European vines onto American roots, you got vines that could successfully resist phylloxera. The question was whether they produced wine as good as they had before.
In France, many vineyard owners couldn’t bear the thought of corrupting their vines with American stock. Burgundy, fearful that its beloved and exceedingly valuable grand cru wines would be irreparably compromised, refused for fourteen years to allow American roots to besmirch its ancient vines, even though those vines were puckering and dying on every hillside. Many growers almost certainly engaged in a bit of illicit grafting anyway, which may have saved their noble wines from extinction.
But it is thanks to American roots that French wines still exist. It is impossible to say whether wines are worse now than they were before. Most authorities think not, but such a desperate remedy is bound to nurture lingering doubts among those who are inclined to have them. What is certainly true is that surviving pre-phylloxera wines have attracted a cachet that has led people to part with a good deal of their money and much of their common sense in a quest to possess something so deliciously irreplaceable. In 1985, Malcolm Forbes, the American publisher, paid $156,450 for a bottle of Château Lafite 1787. This made it much too valuable to drink, so he put it on display in a special glass case. Unfortunately, the spotlights that artfully lit the precious bottle caused the ancient cork to shrink and it fell with a $156,450 splash into the bottle. Even worse was the fate of an eighteenth-century Château Margaux reputed to have once been owned by Thomas Jefferson and valued, very precisely, at $519,750. While showing off his acquisition at a New York restaurant in 1989, William Sokolin, a wine merchant, accidentally knocked the bottle against the side of a serving cart and it broke, in an instant converting the world’s most expensive bottle of wine into the world’s most expensive carpet stain. The restaurant manager dipped a finger in the wine and declared that it was no longer drinkable anyway.
IV
While the Industrial Revolution was producing wondrous machines that transformed how people (and sometimes pests) lived, horticultural science lagged appallingly. Well into the nineteenth century, no one had any real idea even of something as basic as what made plants grow. Everyone knew that soil needed fertilizing, but there was little agreement on why it did or what constituted an effective fertilizer. A survey of farmers in the 1830s showed that the fertilizers in use at that time included sawdust, feathers, sea sand, hay, dead fish, oyster shells, wool rags, ashes,