MALADIES OF THE VINE
It is too often forgotten that the vinelands of Europe, and the majority of the Australian, North and South African vineyards planted with European vines, came within an ace of total destruction by those terrible scourges the Oidium (first noted in 1845) and the Phylloxera (which appeared in 1868), which devastated the viticultural world only a decade or two apart in the middle of the last century. Both came from America, and pious French vignerons see in Prohibition a divine visitation on a country so hardened in iniquity as to have wantonly disseminated, if not deliberately incubated, these frightful pestilences, in despair of ever equalling the quality of European wines. Of the two, the latter, because it was recurrent and seems to be endemic to the vine, was by far the more catastrophic. Chemical means, such as sulphur-spraying, were eventually devised for coping with the former, so that it could be, if not eradicated, at least held in check. The Phylloxera, on the other hand, for long defied the concerted efforts of the world’s most skilful chemists and agriculturists, traversing Europe from Portugal to the Crimea like a forest fire, and even passing mysteriously beyond the seas to infest the young vineyards of other continents. The havoc wrought was inestimable, particularly in France, where a million hectares of vineyards, which have never since been replanted, were swept out of existence. Indeed, when this murrain was at its zenith, there was for some time grave doubt whether the French peasantry could ever be induced to replant their perished vines. In the magnitude of its destructiveness and the swiftness and universality of its contagion, the Phylloxera can only be compared to the dreaded Pink Bol-Worm parasite of the cotton-plant. Ultimately salvation was found in wholesale replanting with grafted vines. The peculiarity of this pest was that it attacked the roots, but not the foliage, of the European vines, while the roots of the indigenous American species were as inured against its infection as their foliage was susceptible to it. Thus by grafting picked European vine-shoots on to suitable American vine-stocks, a hardy plant could be evolved, both roots and foliage of which were sufficiently resistent to the cryptogam. There are, of course, plenty of other blights and distempers that afflict the vine in greater or less degree according to the species concerned and the nature of the soil and climate it is grown in. The vigneron’s life is one unceasing round of watch and ward, toil and prayer. Not for a single week in the year can the smallest vineyard go untended. A new and more dreadful Phylloxera might appear at any moment, though the viticulturist is now much better equipped to resist fresh parasitic invasions.
A word may be said in connection with the maladies peculiar to the vine on the vexed question of the relative merits of the wines grown from grafted and ungrafted vines. It is usually claimed that the quality of the pre-phylloxera wines, grown from old French ungrafted vines, was infinitely superior to anything that the best grafted vines can ever hope to produce. This contention is not supported by the consensus of opinion among wine-growers and wine-merchants, though some make a reservation in favour of the old vieilles souches Burgundies. The new vines show no “yellow streak.” They have acquired none of the primitive characteristics of native American vines, such as their foxy flavour, except their New-World vigour. The wines they yield mature more rapidly and are certainly, like the grafted vines themselves, shorter-lived, but they give an equal quality with a slightly larger yield per acre. Fifty or a hundred years hence it will be possible to pass a more definite and dispassionate judgment on this controversy. It should, however, be remembered that those who insistently decry all wines grown from grafted vines are generally old gentlemen who have already reached that age when, like the Señor d’Asumar, in “Gil Blas,” the peaches of their youth seem infinitely larger, juicier and more luscious than any that are grown to-day.