The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World [Hardcover]

Christy Campbell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 25, 2005

In the mid-1860s, grapevines in southeastern France inexplicably began to wither and die. French botanist Jules-Émile Planchon was sent to investigate. Magnifying glass in hand, he discovered that the vine roots were covered in microscopic yellow insects. The aphids would be named Phylloxera vastatrix—“the dry leaf devastator.”Where they had come from was a mystery.

Soon the noblest vineyards in Europe and California came under biological siege. No one could slow phylloxera’s maddening, destructive pace. The French government offered a prize of three hundred thousand gold francs for a remedy, and increasingly bizarre suggestions flooded in. Planchon believed he had the answer and set out to convince the skeptical wine-making and scientific establishments. Aided by the American entomologist Charles Valentine Riley and a decade of research into the strange life history of the insect, Planchon at long last proved that the remedy rested within the vines themselves.

The Botanist and the Vintner is an astonishing account of one of the earliest and most successful applications of science to an ecological disaster. And even now, the story continues as new strains of phylloxera attack vineyards in France, California, and New Zealand.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the mid-1860s, after countless centuries of bearing the fruit that would become wine, French grapevines began to wither and die in ever increasing numbers and no one knew why. It started in southeastern France, in the Rhone Valley, as Christy Campbell tells the tale in his masterful The Botanist and the Vintner. Within 30 years the inexorable rolling disaster that was the phylloxera infestation had reached into every nook and cranny of France's wine making regions, destroying nearly all. Everywhere the wine grape grew--England, Spain, Italy, Germany, Eastern Europe, and even Australia--phylloxera appeared and took no prisoners. Except for American grape vines. The little bug didn't seem to have much taste for the skunky wines of native American grapes.

Christy Campbell, British journalist and, if The Botanist and the Vintner is any example, master storyteller, waltzes the reader into the middle of a fascinating tale of discovery and combat and never stops dancing. The book reads like a detective novel, a page-turner you can't put down. And it's about a bug, phylloxera, a root-sucking aphid that absolutely wiped clean the grand vineyards of France and thrived in defiance of both peasant remedy and all that "modern" science could bring to bear.

The modern science of the time, mind you, included debating Darwin's new theory of evolution. So it's really at the beginning of discovery and scientific technique. Despite a French government prize of 300,000 gold francs for a remedy, it took 30 years and more to pinpoint the reason for the vineyard die-off, and a practical way of defeating the organism. Grafting onto American rootstock – a rootstock that was the initial cause of the disaster – won the day though not the reward.

Campbell both begins and ends his tale in California's Napa Valley, where phylloxera once again raised its nasty little head toward the end of the 20th century, about 100 years after the struggle in France. It cost millions of dollars to bring the bug to bear. But this time part of the solution turned in a transgenic direction which is, of course, a threat with a completely different vintage. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly

In 1864, France's wine industry was in mid-boom and on the verge of facing a modern crisis: an ecological disaster brought on by global trade. Samples of American grapevines carried Phylloxera vastatrix, a tiny aphid to which they were resistant, to France, whose vineyards were devastated by it. In this detailed, well-researched book, British journalist Campbell weaves the social and ecological strands of the upheaval together: its nearly unnoticeable beginnings, when vines in a single vineyard in the south of France began losing leaves in midsummer; the devastation of millions of acres of vineyards and with them the livelihood of small farmers; the search for the cause, full of mistakes and dead ends; the search for the cure, equally flub-filled and as often driven by superstition as empiricism; and, finally, the transatlantic solution. Even the taste of French wine was in danger, because the sturdy American vines produced appalling wine. Portraits of the researchers who carried the day, colorful quotes and occasional cliffhangers produce a story lively enough for amateur wine lovers and armchair historians. It's also a good summary for wine makers and enologists, with a clear discussion of the elaborate life cycle of the aphid, a fascinating look at the pride and prejudice that drove French wine makers and brief coverage of the Phylloxera crisis in California during the 1990s. Illus.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books; 1st edition (March 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156512460X
• ISBN-13: 978-1565124608
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,075,063 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars OK bordering on lousy, March 10, 2006

By 

Tony Purmal (San Jose, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World (Hardcover)

When I got this book I looked forward to an exciting, intriguing story based on the reviews I'd read. Unfortunately what I found was an unimpressive, somewhat disorganized telling of a great story. I found the writing to be rather boring and uninspired. The organization of the story was disappointing and I felt that the characters could have been more fully developed.

It would have been nice if the publishers had seen fit to place the photographs and drawings in the book accompanying the text. It also would have been nice to have had more maps in the book showing the spread of the phylloxera.

I love books on science and I love books on wine, so it isn't as if I was a mystery fan who was sucked into reading this book based on the hype. I was disappointed in the way the story was told, the way the information was organized and the lack of accompanying material to bring it all together. I give the book a thumbs up for the information in it and a thumbs down for the way it was written and presented.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Victory Over the Aphids, May 13, 2005

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World (Hardcover)

Legendary French wines were almost wiped out when the vines that produced their grapes withered in the nineteenth century. The problem was one that has become familiar; our capacity to ship species from one continent to another has meant that we can have much more variety in our plants and animals, but it also endangers the homebodies that have to meet the newcomers. In _The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World_ (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), Christy Campbell writes that in the 1840s, trade in grape vines proceeded with "no barriers, no inspectorate, no concept of biological quarantine." The result was that tiny aphids with an extraordinary life cycle made their entry from America into France, and found the sap of the French grape vines exactly to their liking. Campbell has told the story of this disaster much like a mystery, and indeed, the vintners who saw their vines rapidly wither had no idea what was happening. A voracious caterpillar had threatened their plants two decades before, and a fungus had come shortly afterwards, but no one had seen a pattern of vine death like this one, with the leaves rapidly drying and curling up. There were only guesses about what was going on; too much rain, smoke in the air or iron in the soil from locomotives, and even emanations from telegraph lines were held to be responsible. Perhaps it was as simple as soil erosion or bad weather. No one knew.

The problem was an aphid usually called phylloxera. It took a long time to finger this particular culprit for many reasons, among which was that the tiny insect was not found on the dead vines. The simple explanation was that the aphids sucked all the sap they could out of the roots of the plant, and with nothing further to eat, moved on. Eventually, entomologists worked out the confusing life cycle of the aphid, which included several different forms of adults, some laying eggs on leaves, some laying eggs on the roots, and others having flying sexual forms. The aphids had been brought to France from America. The aphids and the American vines had long ago drawn a truce; aphids still infested the plants, but the plant developed mechanisms to keep alive through the assault, and the aphids settled in to feeding steadily off the living rather than killing the plants outright. The French vines had no such protection, so the aphids sucked them dry and moved on. Before finding an elegant solution to the problem, vintners simply had to pull up the dead vines and start growing something else, but that did not keep them from trying fanciful remedies, especially when the government offered a reward. Some proposed setting vials of holy water from Lourdes among the withering vines. Putting potatoes or frogs into the soil to draw away the poison had equal effect. Snail slime was championed, as were marching bands and a "beating wheelbarrow." Insecticides were useless. The problem had come from America, and the solution was from America as well. The solution was to use the root stocks of the American vines (vines which bore grapes the French considered vastly inferior), but to graft upon them the French vines which had been cultivated for centuries.

Campbell has told an enthralling story of science at work. It is a true success story, but attempts to control nature seldom result in total or permanent success. The final section of his book reveals that outbreaks continue to occur and that the insects can develop new strains to which the old solution does not apply. Perhaps the rootstocks can be immunized. Perhaps, in these days of genetic modification, the genes from American vines that co-evolved with the phylloxera could be somehow inserted into the French varieties. GM wines are probably inevitable. The wine world used its wits to battle one pest successfully a century ago, but there will be others, and the story is not all told yet.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE WINE BUG, September 22, 2005

By 

charles falk (Novato, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Botanist and the Vintner: How Wine Was Saved for the World (Hardcover)

This is a marvelous book that will appeal equally to wine buffs, history buffs, science buffs, and the general reader. It is constructed like a mystery story (replete with detectives, victims, and villains) about the search for the cause and cure for a grapevine malady that began decimating European vineyards in the 1860s. Don't be put off by the inept title on the American edition.

Christy Campbell turns the Byzantine life cycle of Phylloxera vastatrix into a plot device to be unraveled by doughty scientific sleuths on both sides of the Atlantic. He describes the tragic effect of the plague on peasant vignerons of the Midi, where it first appeared, and the resulting political fallout. Bizarre remedies and inventions offered to cope with this root aphid provide comic relief. Campbell even includes short summaries of the afterlives of his chief protagonists. The book has excellent maps and a detailed timeline to help the reader keep track of the sequence of events.

Campbell is neither a wine writer nor an enthusiast, but rather the defense correspondent for the British Sunday Telegraph. His two previous books dealt with Victorian political intrigues. Nevertheless, his meticulous research in French archives has unearthed information that will be new even to those who think they are well informed about Phylloxera.

The weakest part of the book is its final chapter, a hodgepodge dealing with the new outbreak of Phylloxera in California beginning in the 1980's and other recent developments. After the thorough way Campbell dealt with earlier events, its brevity is disappointing. He is much more lenient with the mandarins of UC Davis than with the scientific bureaucrats of 19th century France. He goes into great detail about the confusion engendered by official pronouncements in the earlier era, but ignores the obfuscation and mixed messages that emanated from Davis during the California crisis. Instead he marvels at the scientific tools quickly brought to bear on the problem. Nor does Campbell analyze the economic consequences of the "reconstitution" of California viticulture -- Perhaps because it is still playing out. For bad measure he includes a few pages about genetic engineering of grapevines and a five page "Postcript" on the question of whether wine from grafted vines tastes as good as that from those grown on their own roots. All three topics deserve betters treatment than is offered here.