I'll Drink to That by Rudolph Chelminski

temperatures, and crop loss caused widespread starvation. In the wine regions, vines froze solid in the arctic air. Most of France’s vines died and had to be pulled up and replanted the following spring; the small numbers that survived were saved only by the drastic surgery of amputation at ground level. Eventually, after a harvestless year or two, the roots gave new shoots and the vines were reborn.
    There was no such remedy against phylloxera. Quite simply, no one had any notion of how to kill or control the bug. A long, agonizing period of grasping at straws now took over the Beaujolais, just as it had done earlier in the Midi. Sensibly enough, botanists advised selecting only the healthiest of seedlings to plant in place of dead vines, while thoroughly preparing the ground to receive them and boosting their resistance with potassium-based fertilizers, but heartier young vines only provided the intruders with more nourishing sap. It had already been established that certain southern owners had managed to save half or more of their average crops by physically flooding their vineyards for a couple of months in late autumn, thereby drowning the parasites, but the system was obviously futile for anything but flat, low-lying terrain, and out of the question in the hills and slopes of the Beaujolais. When Raclet’s old boiling water method gave no result, peasants were reduced to the heartbreaking task of attempting to physically remove the aphid eggs by hand, in a grotesquely laborious process that involved digging deeply around the vines and cleaning trunks and roots one by one with a chain-mail glove. Although largely useless, the glove at least had the advantage of being cheap, and for a few illusion-filled years it was widelydisseminated among winegrowers. Several steps above that were the considerably more expensive high-tech devices of the period like the “injector rod” of the ingenious inventor Victor Vermorel. The apparatus resembled a giant clyster, and featured a cylindrical storage tank, two handles and a foot pedal for squirting carbon disulfide, an industrial solvent, into the ground around the roots. Some minor success had been reported with this compound as an insecticide, and for a few years the government even awarded subsidies for its use, but, like the potassium sulfur carbonate treatments earlier certified by the Ministry of Agriculture, it had the unfortunate side effect of killing the vine along with the insects in anything stronger than light, carefully calculated doses. Vermorel’s company also put a “sulfur plow” on the market for delivering an underground stream of carbon disulfide, but the device was expensive and the chemical treatment was highly toxic to the human nervous system, easily flammable and explosive. Beaujolais old-timers used to recount stories heard from their elders of muddle-headed vignerons unthinkingly lighting up for a cigarette break after a few hours with the Vermorel plow or injector rod, and expiring in a horrible, self-inflicted inferno.
    The usual prayers, masses and pilgrimages only underlined the degree of disarray that had overcome the winemaking community. For want of anything better, folk and artisanal methods cropped up in patches wherever human imagination sought out the give-it-a-try approach. At the suggestion that the chemical composition of urine might be a palliative, one enterprising army unit in a Lyon suburb diligently collected tanks of horse pee to be ladled out over the vines, and one Beaujolais schoolteacher was reported to have led his schoolboys out of the classroom at recess time to earnestly faire pipi in military formation on adjacent vine rows. (For understandable reasons of reigning tenets of modesty, only “masculine urine” was deemed useful for this cure.) The French being a race of inveterate home inventors and undiscovered Thomas Edisons, a vast range of more or less plausible procedures, powders, liquids and chemical