We were visiting one of the vineyards in Southern Peru and conversing with Engineer Edwin Landeo. He motioned towards one of the vines, and showed us a leaf that was totally doubled over, and its top face was full of small yellow lumps. It was then that the conversation turned to the Phylloxera and the Great Plague of the 19th Century.
It is known that during the second half of the 19th Century, under the commercial exchange that took place over the sea, plagues that attacked the vines of Europe were also transported from the new world. Three of them had American origin, and against which the vitis europea was not prepared. These plagues caused great damages until remedies were found to counteract them, which was done with large economic sacrifices, and for the first time, with the invaluable help of science.
Two of the plagues above mentioned were caused by fungus, and
the
third, the Phylloxera, is borne by an insect, a parasite of the vitis
Americana, which lives within the plant without damaging it. But when it
was transferred to the vitis europea it strangled the plants’ roots and
caused the inexorable death of the plant.
The Phylloxera, Daktulosphaira vitifoliae (Fitch, 1854), is considered to be the most global, devastating and decisive plague of the world viticulture history. The fact is that no event, plague, or sickness, spread as fast and caused as much change to the centers of grape production as the arrival of this insect to Europe did at the end of the 19th Century.
Although there are some natural conditions that slow the spread (dry environments and sandy soils), in the rest of the cases there is no natural chemical treatment against this plague. The only solution was to substitute European bases for American ones. More than 5 million hectares of vineyards had to be pulled up throughout Europe from 1870 to 1930.
The production of wine suffered large ups and downs; the scarcity in determined periods increased the price of wine to values that had never been reached before. The international wine market reached volumes never before seen; the areas of vineyards experienced huge changes. At the end of the process, the fight against the plagues and the surmounting of the crisis brought about great scientific advances and a modernization of the sector, up to the point that viticulture in the 20th Century really was a “new viticulture.”
By Gladys Romaní*
Translated by Katrina Heimark
*Sommelier, Specialist and Pisco Taster
Pisco bilingual magazine
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