The Secret Is In The Quality Of The Cut

In the mid-nineteenth century, French winemakers imported species of grapes from the eastern coast of the United States and Canada to see if they could mix them with European varieties to make new kinds of wine grapes. But as is often the case with plants sent around the world, the grapes were not all the winemakers got. A species of tiny aphid came along for the ride.

Starting in the early 1860s, a blight, commonly known as grape phylloxera, sucked the vineyards of Europe to death. The blight devastated the European wine industry for two decades. The disease traveled and moved to places where Old World vines had been transported to countries who were developing an infant wine industry based on imported grapes. These included South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and California.

Winemakers resorted to desperate measures to try to stop the blight, but the hard-won solution turned out to be an old agricultural strategy for improving fruit trees. Old World vines above ground were grafted to aphid-tolerant American rootstock, and with that, the wine industry was saved.

In San Luis Obispo County, grower and winemaker Pierre Dallidet was praised for grafting grapes onto Mission Grape rootstock to protect the vine from phylloxera. He worked with the French government to propagate cuttings from French varieties in the 1870s. These varieties were sent to France to be planted in new vineyards after phylloxera had been eliminated. Many other French citizens living in California also participated in the effort to restore the French vineyards. Ironically, one of the great vineyards, St. Remy, in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, was decimated by phylloxera in 1915, the same year that its owner, A.B. Hasbrouck died.

A. B. & Rosa Hasbrouck Circa 1888

Grafting

Roman mosaic from the  3rd century AD.

Grafting is often used in the vineyard industry to combine the desirable qualities of different grapevine varieties. Grafting is an asexual propagation technique. This is the process of placing a shoot system (a scion) of one cultivar or species on the root system (a rootstock) of another.

Grafting has been used since Ancient Roman times as a method to propagate vines. It became vitally important for most of the wine-growing regions in the world at the end of the 19th century, resulting in many of the vineyards which we see today being planted with grafted vines.

In nurseries, with an aim to produce phylloxera-resistant seedlings, growers conduct “bench grafting” to join dormant cuttings of European species (scion) and American species (rootstock) together. The vines to be grafted must be healthy and vigorous, and without disease or insects.

The Wine History Project of San Luis Obispo County has in its collection a bench grafting tool, V&F61, known as the “La Rapide” model. It would have originally been used in a French vineyard between 1890 and 1920. It is made of cast iron, steel, and brass with the dimensions of six inches wide and fifteen inches long.

Grafting gives vintners power. Today, over 90% of the world’s vines are grown from grafted, predominantly American, rootstock. Did it take a catastrophe to make it so?