Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [36]
In 1868 the pharmacist J. E. Planchon, a hero of the French wine industry, discovered the link between the small yellow aphid and the dying vines. But as so often, opinions varied, and many believed the aphids were an effect of the disease, not the cause. It wasn’t until 1870 that the American Charles V. Riley demonstrated that the phylloxera aphid was responsible for the leaf blight on American vines and the root disease in Europe. Furthermore, the odd life cycle of the aphid made the usual methods of attack ineffective. Laliman and Bazille came up with the idea that eventually worked: grafting vinifera onto resistant American root-stocks. It was not a new idea—the Spanish had been doing something similar in Mexico since the early sixteenth century—but it worked, and the Herculean task of reconstitution began throughout France.
The effects of phylloxera were dreadful for small French wine growers, many of whom emigrated—to the eventual benefit of the world’s wines. At the time of the outbreak, too, wine growers were responding to skyrocketing demand by overplanting, growing inferior grapes, and growing them in unsuitable terrain. Much of the quality of today’s wines, and many of the varietals we now take for granted, might simply not have existed had it not been for the phylloxera aphid. To call it a blessing in disguise is over -egging the pudding, unquestionably; still …
But back to the cafés of Paris. The first thing to happen when phylloxera began its devastation in France was that wine became scarcer and the price went up. The vie bohème of Paris, on the other hand, was not about to stop. It simply needed another fuel, and absinthe won the day. Centered upon the Moulin Rouge in Montmartre, at the heart of the Parisian red light zone, so marvelously chronicled by the stunted, aristocratic, ungainly, and hopelessly alcoholic Toulouse-Lautrec, the absinthe craze spread unstoppably. Even if not drunk in the form of Toulouse-Lautrec’s terre-tremblant—“earth shaker,” made of half absinthe and half cognac—but consumed in the usual way, with five parts of water slowly dripped through a sugar lump held in a pierced spoon to provoke the louche and sweeten the bitter taste of wormwood, absinthe was an unforgiving drink. In 1910, the French drank 9.5 million gallons of the stuff, and the Swiss banned it. In 1912, the Americans banned it, and in 1915 the French government decided that, far from being a specific against malaria for the troops, it was responsible for mass desertions from the trenches; that, together with pressure from the French wine lobby, anxious to regain its status as provider of the national drink, meant that the French banned it, too.
The draftsmen of the French law had, however, made one tiny mistake: they had banned the sale of absinthe in France but not the manufacture. After a ruling from the U.K. government allowing British companies to sell absinthe in any European country where it was not specifically banned, La Fée absinthe went into production in Paris.
We asked how steam had indirectly driven Toulouse-Lautrec to absinthe. Recall that the French colonists had been experimenting in Florida since the mid-seventeenth century; recall, too, that vines had been across the Atlantic for wine-growing experiments for much of the time since then. Why was it only in the 1860s that phylloxera first began its devastation of the French vineyards?
The answer is almost certainly that it was only after 1838 that regular steamship crossings of the Atlantic were established. In the days of sail and the early days of steam (the first steamship to make the crossing, the Savannah, in 1819, only had a tiny 90 hp auxiliary engine), the voyage took just under a month: too long for the aphids to survive. By 1838, the Great Western took half that time, and the subsequent generation of iron-hulled, screw-driven steamships