French Wine by Rod Phillips

Author:Rod Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520285231
Publisher: University of California Press

DIAGRAM 6.1. Area under vines, France, 1860–1914

As the respective merits and disadvantages of these solutions were being debated and tried in the 1870s, phylloxera broke out of the southern regions where it had been confined for a decade and began to kill vines in a much wider area of central France (see map 6.1). By 1878, nearly half France’s départements were affected, with 370,000 hectares (915,000 acres) of vines dead and another 250,000 hectares (620,000 acres) dying—more than a quarter of the national vineyard area. All varieties were affected, and even those with harder wood, such as cabernet sauvignon, could not resist the aphid. But the pace and scale of the disaster varied from region to region, and because France’s vignerons were directly affected at different times and confronted varying levels of destruction, they did not develop a consensus on what they were facing. Vines began to die in Entre-deux-Mers in 1867, and one hundred communities in Bordeaux were affected by 1872; by 1876 phylloxera had spread to both banks of the Garonne River, and four years later 100,000 of Bordeaux’s 170,000 hectares (250,000 of 420,000 acres) of vineyards were dead or dying.14 In the Loire valley’s Muscadet region, in contrast, there was no sign of phylloxera until 1884.15

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