compounds—petroleum, viscous tar, sea salt, electricalcharges—was proposed and sometimes tried out on the unfortunate vines, all to no avail. Campbell, who went to heroic lengths of research to discover a whole thesaurus of other suggested remedies, enumerated a selection that ranged from snail slime (“rich in calcium”) to jellyfish, lard, mustard, turpentine, nicotine, asparagus, parsley, dynamite blasts, marching bands to “drum the aphids out of their underground fastness” to something called a beating wheelbarrow, its mechanical mallets presumably driving the little parasites to distraction by its maddening, endlessly repeated thumping.
As the search went on for a way to stop the deadly bug, French wine production plummeted. In consequence, the decade 1880-1890, and even beyond, was an excellent time to be a seller, if you had wine to sell of course. Those who had laid in good stocks did very well for themselves, and indeed, phylloxera was something of a backhanded benediction for the big wine dealers, who had no trouble at all in unloading even their mediocre reserves. Of course Beaujolais peasants also commanded good prices for their last remaining barrels and sold high, retaining only a strict minimum of bottles for themselves, in case of medical emergency. Wine imports rose dramatically—Italy, Spain and Algeria would still be producing for a while—and, inevitably, ersatz wines soon made their appearance. To the old peasant wine-replacement recipes invented in times of dearth (mostly local fruits and herbs infused in water and boosted with a jolt of pure alcohol) a more up-to-date, scientifico-commercial approach now yielded industrial amounts of fake wine and wine replacements. A common process was to bathe imported Greek and Turkish raisins in warm water for ten days, color the liquid with various essences, some natural, some not, and, to lend a winy bite, with tartaric acid, preserving the result with a dose of sulfur. Far from being back-shed moonshine, the stuff was advertised and sold in the most respectable shops. Three million hectoliters of raisin wine were manufactured in France in 1890 alone.
Professor Garrier of Lyon University told me of an even more crooked product: “sugar wine.” This one didn’t require any grapes at all, fresh or dried: a mixture of beet sugar, water, tartaric acid and colorings created a drink at eight degrees of alcohol content after yeasts interacted with the sugar. The product could even be dressed up in regional styles by the addition of different synthesized essences like “Bouquet of Pommard, Old Bordeaux, Dried Extract of Bordeaux” or “caramel-malaga” for white wine. Although this was clearly chicanery, it doesn’t seem to have been prosecuted with excessive zeal. France was thirsty, and a lot of make-do solutions were more or less tolerated for want of clear laws and instruments for enforcing them. Five million hectoliters of sugar wine were on the market around 1890, Garrier reported in one of his papers, and it was not until 1908, after violent riots and demonstrations by winegrower unions, that this unlovable ersatz was finally put out of business via the simple expedient of a heavy new tax on sugar.
These had been terrible times for France. The country was still recovering from the disastrous war of 1870, which had cost it Alsace-Lorraine (a lot of good wine lost there), the imperium of Napoléon III and a breathtaking quantity of gold in war reparations that had to be handed over to Bismarck’s triumphant Prussians. In this unsettled period the political scene of the newborn Third Republic was a roiling theater of passionate debate and controversy, but even with all that the phylloxera scourge continued to be one of the biggest ongoing news stories of the day. French gourmets and politicians did not take lightly to drinking factory-made substitutes, and returning to the genuine product of nature had become a national priority. But how to beat
As the search went on for a way to stop the deadly bug, French wine production plummeted. In consequence, the decade 1880-1890, and even beyond, was an excellent time to be a seller, if you had wine to sell of course. Those who had laid in good stocks did very well for themselves, and indeed, phylloxera was something of a backhanded benediction for the big wine dealers, who had no trouble at all in unloading even their mediocre reserves. Of course Beaujolais peasants also commanded good prices for their last remaining barrels and sold high, retaining only a strict minimum of bottles for themselves, in case of medical emergency. Wine imports rose dramatically—Italy, Spain and Algeria would still be producing for a while—and, inevitably, ersatz wines soon made their appearance. To the old peasant wine-replacement recipes invented in times of dearth (mostly local fruits and herbs infused in water and boosted with a jolt of pure alcohol) a more up-to-date, scientifico-commercial approach now yielded industrial amounts of fake wine and wine replacements. A common process was to bathe imported Greek and Turkish raisins in warm water for ten days, color the liquid with various essences, some natural, some not, and, to lend a winy bite, with tartaric acid, preserving the result with a dose of sulfur. Far from being back-shed moonshine, the stuff was advertised and sold in the most respectable shops. Three million hectoliters of raisin wine were manufactured in France in 1890 alone.
Professor Garrier of Lyon University told me of an even more crooked product: “sugar wine.” This one didn’t require any grapes at all, fresh or dried: a mixture of beet sugar, water, tartaric acid and colorings created a drink at eight degrees of alcohol content after yeasts interacted with the sugar. The product could even be dressed up in regional styles by the addition of different synthesized essences like “Bouquet of Pommard, Old Bordeaux, Dried Extract of Bordeaux” or “caramel-malaga” for white wine. Although this was clearly chicanery, it doesn’t seem to have been prosecuted with excessive zeal. France was thirsty, and a lot of make-do solutions were more or less tolerated for want of clear laws and instruments for enforcing them. Five million hectoliters of sugar wine were on the market around 1890, Garrier reported in one of his papers, and it was not until 1908, after violent riots and demonstrations by winegrower unions, that this unlovable ersatz was finally put out of business via the simple expedient of a heavy new tax on sugar.
These had been terrible times for France. The country was still recovering from the disastrous war of 1870, which had cost it Alsace-Lorraine (a lot of good wine lost there), the imperium of Napoléon III and a breathtaking quantity of gold in war reparations that had to be handed over to Bismarck’s triumphant Prussians. In this unsettled period the political scene of the newborn Third Republic was a roiling theater of passionate debate and controversy, but even with all that the phylloxera scourge continued to be one of the biggest ongoing news stories of the day. French gourmets and politicians did not take lightly to drinking factory-made substitutes, and returning to the genuine product of nature had become a national priority. But how to beat
Similar Books
