I'll Drink to That (9 page)

But the derision paled when, the following summer, his vines stood tall and healthy amid the scene of general desolation around Romanèche. Reluctantly, a few of the naysayers swallowed their pride and put their coffeepots on the stove. Over the next years more and more healthy vines appeared in the Beaujolais, and there was no more arguing with success. The Raclet method, as fastidious and time-consuming as it was—a two-man team, one to heat the water at the boiler and the other to treat the vines, could cover only five acres of vine over a ten-day period—proved to be totally valid. In 1842 his boiling water treatment was officially recognized and certified as effective. Equipment manufacturers rushed to design sophisticated portable boiler and hot water delivery systems. The Beaujolais vineyards were saved.

Alas, poor Raclet gained nothing for his decisive discovery, not in his lifetime at any rate. Broke, scorned by his neighbors, his health ruined, he had already moved away by the time his method was universally adopted. Removed to the boring flatlands between Paris and Normandy, where no vines grew, cows populated the fields, and the natives drank cider, he died in 1844. By way of national amends, the French government awarded him a posthumous
Légion d’Honneur.
In 1864, a handsome Benoît Raclet bust was inaugurated in Romanèche’s village square, where it still stands today, not far from the little Raclet museum. Now, on the last Sunday of every October, the town gussies up for the annual Fête Raclet in his memory, even if his laborious old pest control method has now been supplanted by modern sulfur-based treatments. On the day of the big celebration, schoolchildren trot out to sing the obligatory Raclet cantata, notables make their speeches, and professionals and buyers get a sneak preview of the year’s wines, scheduled for release over the following months.

No sooner had French vines recovered from
pyrale
than they were struck by two fungal diseases. The first,
oïdium
—powdery mildew, as it is known in English—was a spore that came to France after a first appearancein England, probably aboard a popular ornamental vine that had been exported from the United States to Europe in large quantities since the 1830s. Once again, vineyards throughout the country fell under attack: after a fine gray white dusting appeared on leaves, grape bunches turned moldy and then split open, decayed and dried up. By 1854, French wine production had dropped by more than two-thirds, and as usual, any number of ingenious and extravagant ideas were proposed for the fight, but the solution finally proved to be relatively straightforward. English greenhouse keepers, affected by the blight ahead of the French, had discovered that pure sulfur, powdered and applied by bellowslike contraptions, stopped the fungus in its tracks. Picking up the cue, French industry rapidly produced the chemical in large quantities, and soon every vineyard in the country was showered in a dusty yellow fog. Enthusiastic overdoses of the stuff at the beginning of the campaign—the old error of more is better—often resulted in scorched foliage and local epidemics of eye problems like severe conjunctivitis among unprotected workers, but at length vignerons in the Beaujolais and elsewhere learned to control their ardor and their doses of chemicals. Sulfur has remained as a vineyard fixture ever since, not just in France but worldwide. More generally sprayed in a fine mist now rather than delivered in powder form, it is the best and simplest fungicide, and it is used both by industrial-scale producers and organic winemakers.

Late in the 1870s, America’s second fungal gift arrived on French shores and proceeded to gain her vineyards. Downy mildew (
le mildiou
in French), it was called, for the mats of whitish “down” it deposited on vine leaves as it began its business of destroying the grape clusters. Strictly speaking a water mold rather than a classical fungus, downy mildew was in fact a cousin of
Phytophthora infestans,
the American-donated organism that brought the terrible potato blight to Ireland. At length this second form of mildew was beaten by a chemical mix patented in 1885 by Pierre Millardet, professor of botany in the University of Bordeaux’s faculty of science. Millardet was led to his discovery by the manager of the Château Dauzac estate, who had sprayed his vines with vitriol (coppersulfate), whose bright blue-green color would, he was sure, stop local children from stealing his grapes. What Millardet noticed, though, was something more important than the matter of purloined grapes: Dauzac’s vines were mildew-free. Carrying out a series of methodical experiments, he refined the recipe for an effective fungus-killing mixture: 1.5 kilos of copper sulfate mixed with one kilo of slaked lime, to be diluted in water and preventively sprayed over vines.

The
bouillie bordelaise
(literally Bordeaux porridge) that Millardet devised proved to be something of a horticultural panacea. A multipurpose disinfectant and fungicide, it is still widely employed by gardeners today as protection for a wide array of growing things, from apples and tomatoes to roses, potatoes and peaches—and, of course, grapevines. Once again, the vignerons of the Beaujolais set to the task of protecting their livelihood from the parasitic onslaught. At first, they were armed with nothing more sophisticated than buckets of Millardet’s porridge and little moplike applicators for brushing it onto the leaves, or little bunches of broom sprigs with which they splashed the stuff in a primitive, hit-or-miss spray, but the process took forever and the results were woefully imperfect. The Villefranche inventor Victor Vermorel improved efficiency by designing a portable delivery system consisting of a metal tank to be strapped on the back, a hand-operated pump for air pressure and a spray hose for the other hand. Laboring through their vines under the torrid suns of July and August with fifty pounds of gear on their backs, the vignerons faced an impossible dilemma: shed their winter work clothes, and they were soon drenched in a corrosive chemical mist that savaged their skin; or cover up, and they would suffocate in the heat. But with their entire year’s revenues in the balance, they had no choice but to plug along, bearing it with the dogged stoicism of peasants everywhere. Eventually improved machinery modernized and eased the task, first with horse-drawn equipment and then, decades later, with the tractor, but the basic recipe remained unchanged: a visit to almost any French vineyard today will show the characteristic turquoise hue on the vines’ leaves, silent witness to the continuing effectiveness of Millardet’s ingenious mix.

Ingenuity has long been a strong point of this country’s national character. Inveterate tinkerers and improvers, the French always seem to be able to come up with clever, unexpected and elegant solutions to the most complex of problems that have baffled others. With the providential brainpower of men like Pasteur, Raclet, Chaptal and Millardet having appeared when things went wrong, the vignerons of the Beaujolais might have been forgiven for assuming, along with their winemaking confrères elsewhere in France, that their beautiful, blessed land could go on indefinitely in the production of more and more and better and better wines, for the greater good of their health, their country’s prestige and everybody’s pocketbooks.

And so, indeed, it appeared to servants of the vine around Beaujeu, Belleville and Villefranche in the two fat decades between 1855 and 1875. Yields were good, prices were high, and production was steadily rising. In the days when Benoît Raclet arrived in Romanèche, the average production of Beaujolais wines had been about 500,000 hectoliters (50 million liters); by 1874, the figure was edging up to near doubling that: 860,000 hectoliters.

Things were looking good. Many peasant landowners of the Beaujolais paid off long-standing debts and got new equipment, while other families that had been stuck in
vigneronnage
for generations were finally able to actually acquire the vines they worked. But under the optimism that the watershed year of 1874 generated everywhere in the Beaujolais, a somber bass note of caution appeared when, that same summer, vine leaves began drying up in the village of Villié-Morgon. The aphid
Phylloxera vastatrix
had arrived in the Beaujolais.

Now it was not just a year’s harvest that was under threat, but the very survival of the vines. What happened over the next few years proved to be worse than even the most gloomy pessimists had imagined: the plants that had so generously produced bumper harvests were doomed. In fact, every last vineyard in France was about to be wiped out.

III

RUIN AND SALVATION

At the start, far too many Beaujolais wine professionals succumbed to the old temptation of hubris: this thing won’t hit
us
. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century everyone knew that teeming swarms of a mysterious, previously unknown insect had been wrecking vineyards in the south and west for several years, and that the wave of destruction was marching inexorably northward, but the growers of the Beaujolais clung stubbornly to an obdurate, head-in-the-sand denial. All too easily, a hypothesis of folk wisdom developed in the region’s cafés and wine cellars, and once it was out, wishful thinking rapidly turned to dogma: the invader was a lowland bug that thrived in the year-round warmth of the Midi, luxuriant land of lotus-eaters. When it came to the stern frosts and winter winds of the
monts du Beaujolais,
it would meet its match. When, in spite of some disquieting signs of early leaf damage, the harvests of 1874 and 1875 proved to be abundant and of good quality, some moralizing voices went as far as to suggest that the southerners had been justly punished for their notorious sin of overproducing, an action known everywhere in the rough, colorful idiom of the peasantry:
faire pisser la vigne.
Causing the vine to “piss” great amounts of grape juice had been unworkmanlike. And besides, by flooding the market with wine it had tended to lower prices.

The folly of the optimistic folk hypothesis was soon demonstrated: the bug was a survivor, a real champion. What no one realized in those early days was that
Phylloxera vastatrix
was unhurried. In winter it simply lay dormant, and in the spring it picked up where it had left off, taking two or three leisurely years to kill a vine. Those two bumper harvests were the swan’s song, sadly sublime, of pre-phylloxera Beaujolais.

Winged and wind-borne, the tiny aphid industriously pursued its business in the Beaujolais exactly as it had done in the south, moving from vine to vine and replicating itself in batches of summer and winter eggs that produced an astonishing quantity of offspring: between March and October, one noted investigator calculated, a single individual could give birth to 25 to 30 million descendants. Dropping its winter eggs on the vine’s gnarled bark, it began a furiously repetitive reproductive cycle that moved from the bark to the leaves, drying them and provoking blisters, or galls, in which succeeding generations—born in parthenogenesis, without the need of a fertilizing male—thrived and continued the implacable colonization. Around midsummer, a generation of larvae, or nymphs, moved down the bark and underground to the fine, spidery webs of the vine’s rootlets, fixed themselves to the extremities and began sucking out the sap that was the plant’s lifeblood. These subterranean feeders in turn laid more eggs, which hatched into nymphs that slowly gained the surface and emerged as winged, adult aphids ready to continue the infernal routine of simultaneously ravaging and reproducing. By the time they departed, the host plants were finished. Desiccated and lifeless, they were good for nothing more than firewood.

The above is only the briefest summary of a three-year life cycle that the British writer Christy Campbell, author of the remarkable phylloxera study
The Botanist and the Vintner
, took several pages to describe in detail. Little wonder that it had baffled quantities of French scientists who had been investigating the insect’s behavior for several years before it came to the Beaujolais. By then, though, there was one thing of which the teams of botanists and entomologists that had been tracking
Phylloxera vastatrix
since its first attacks on vineyards near Avignon were certain, and a very unpleasant irony it was: the ravenous little creatures had arrived in France attached to hardy American vines that had been imported in the 1860s because they were resistant to
oïdium
—the powdery mildew that had come from America in the first place. So it was America that had given France—and, indeed, all of Europe, because the aphid’s depredations knew no borders—the two most recent and violent aggressors of the vine. But what the scientific community could not know just then was that the irony looped back upon itself: salvation would also appear from the same horizon; a new dawn for the vines would break in the wake of that fatal sunset.

In time, that is. It took a while. By 1874, when there was no more hiding from the fact that the Beaujolais was under attack, the regional authorities had notices posted in every town hall ordering that any vines showing signs of infestation be pulled up and immediately burned and the ground within a radius of five meters dug up and turned over. The measures were useless, of course, and perhaps even worse than useless. Digging the ground could only release tiny buried creatures, and the mere act of pulling up infected vines could attach more of them, or their eggs, to workers’ clothing and tools, to be transported wherever they went. In any case, the orders went largely ignored, because human nature was human nature: most vignerons turned a blind eye to the blisters on their vines’ leaves in those last two banner harvest years of 1874 and 1875. After all, their grape bunches were still heavy and apparently healthy; and directing a peasant to destroy his present livelihood for some vague future general good was really asking too much. Besides, a fanciful new rationalization had emerged, one that encouraged them to do nothing: Beaujolais vines grew higher than those of the Midi, and someone postulated that the female aphid reproduced with difficulty “in altitude.” So the vignerons shut up and carried on as usual, with no one the wiser and everyone hoping for the best. Underground, the little bugs continued feeding.