“THERE was no rot… but suddenly under the magnifying lens of the instrument appeared an insect, a plant louse of yellowish colour, tight on the wood, sucking the sap… it is not one, it is not ten, but hundreds, thousands… They are everywhere…”
In 1868, botanist Jules-émile Planchon unmasked the culprit behind a national crisis. For five years, a blight had been stealing across France’s vineyards. Its cause was invisible, its spread inexorable. Always it followed the same pattern. First a single vine would wither, then a circle of plants. Entire vineyards were wiped out within years.
Panic grew and blame flew. Vineyards were watered with white wine and pruning cuts sealed with hot wax to halt the blight’s advance. One supposed cure involved burying live toads under the vines to draw out the mysterious poison.
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Even Planchon’s revelation couldn’t halt the blight. Before it was finally stalled in the 1890s, it had laid waste to an estimated 40 per cent of French vineyards, and changed the face of European viticulture for ever.
With the vines, scores of rural communes also saw their livelihoods wither. And that’s where the story of the Great French Wine Blight has now earned a second telling. Its gradual spread and devastating effects illuminate the complex relationships between wine, poverty and crime.
The cause of the blight was the tiny aphid-like bug Daktulosphaira vitifoliae, often known as phylloxera. Its arrival in France was the bitter fruit of technological progress. It travelled across the Atlantic on vines imported from its native home in the Americas. Before the advent of steamships, the voyage was too long, and the insect would have died en route.
The bugs must have made landfall somewhere on France’s southern coast; the first documented case of blight occurred in the commune of Pujaut, near Avignon in the Rhone valley, in 1863. Once they arrived in a vineyard, the bugs would head underground, where they would literally suck the life out of the vines. They depleted the roots’ sap while secreting a fluid that stopped the plant healing, leaving the vines vulnerable to fungal and bacterial infections. Beyond the reach of pesticides and with no native predators below ground, the females reproduced asexually with abandon, each one laying up to 100 clone eggs in a month. With four or more generations annually, one bug could produce more than a billion descendants in one year.
The nature of the blight explains its peculiarly destructive course, but also its gradual geographical spread. Rather than ripping across France within weeks as a virus might, D. vitifoliae moved slowly, perhaps transferred from vineyard to vineyard on the mud of itinerant workers’ shoes, speculates , an economic historian at the Bank of France.
In the late 19th century, agriculture accounted for about 30 per cent of France’s economic output. Wine was the nation’s second most important product after wheat. Estimates have put the total income shock from the blight as high as 15 billion francs, which equates to 75 per cent of one year’s economic output at the time.
Those it hit had few other sources of income, either. “This event affected people who were already at the margin of the economy,” , who researches economics and the law at Sciences Po in Paris. “Peasants and workers on the vines. People who didn’t have any other support.”
That led Bignon and Galbiati, together with labour market expert of Paris Dauphine University, to wonder what insight the blight might give into the social effects of economic dislocation. Standard economic models suggest that people choose between legal and criminal economic activities on their relative costs and benefits. When the income of low-skilled workers with poor job mobility falls, crime rates often rise, because it can be difficult to get a job that pays enough. “When you are poor, you have an incentive to steal because you have to eat,” says Bignon.
But when poverty and crime rise in lockstep, is poverty causing crime or crime poverty? “When there is a lot of crime, businesses can suffer, influencing income,” says Bignon. Disentangling what is cause and what is effect can often be difficult.
The slow spread of the blight provided a natural experiment to test these interplays, thanks to information contained in archived yearbooks from the French Ministry of Justice that set out annual crime records from all French departments throughout the period. “Some areas were hit, some weren’t,” says Bignon. “This allows you to compare lots and lots of groups. The control groups are the areas with no disease.”
As expected, as the blight spread to new areas, instances of property crimes such as theft, counterfeiting and pillaging rose. On average, these crimes were 22 per cent higher in districts affected by the bugs. The rise such as demographic changes caused by patterns of migration.
“While property crime ballooned during the Great French Wine Blight, violent crime slumped”
But there was a twist. While property crime ballooned, violent crime in the worst affected areas slumped, by about 13 per cent on average.
This doesn’t surprise , an economist at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. In 2010, he showed a similar relationship between a of rye and crime in Prussia between 1882 and 1912. “Bad weather increased rye prices, which induced more property crime and fewer violent crimes,” he says.
Rye was used to make bread, but bad weather for rye also meant bad weather for barley, which is used to make beer. In both the French and the Prussian instances, Traxler thinks lack of booze explains the drop in violent crime. “Shock to wine production isn’t just a shock to income, but also to wine consumption,” he says. With less alcohol to drink, people are less inclined to fight. In England and Wales today, for instance, alcohol consumption is thought to contribute to 1.2 million violent incidents a year. “Alcohol consumption makes people more impulsive, less restrained,” says Bignon.
It took a long time for the underlying cause of this economic dislocation to be overcome, even after Planchon had unmasked the malefactor, and it came at a significant price to French exceptionalism. American varieties of vine had always existed alongside phylloxera, and were able to survive the blight. The idea of replacing European vines, which include varieties like Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Merlot, with supposedly inferior American imports was summarily dismissed. Instead, vine growers tried cross-breeding two varieties or grafting the stems of European vines onto the resistant roots of American plants to get the best of New and Old Worlds. That seemed to do the trick, producing excellent grapes on bug-resistant plants, finally halting the blight in the 1890s.
“The idea of replacing the vines with supposedly inferior American imports was summarily dismissed”
Some vineyards with pure European vines still exist in France, Spain and elsewhere. That’s mostly luck, says of Biome Makers, a biotech firm in San Francisco that develops sustainable methods to treat grapevine microbial diseases. These ancient vines, often producing feted and expensive wines, tend to grow in sandy soils, through which the phylloxera bug can’t disperse so easily, he says.
Phylloxera eventually overcomes cross-bred resistance. Most recently in California in the 1980s and 1990s, the bugs caused more than $1 billion of damage to cross-bred vines. Now most vines are grafted, transatlantic mergers that reduce the risk of an epidemic.
At least the world is better prepared now. Harvests are more integrated, so a shortage in one place can be compensated by imports from another. Welfare systems and increased access to credit also help to cushion the blows of economic dislocation. But the story of the Great Blight has eerie pre-echoes of the recent credit crunch, says Bignon. Through the blight’s ravages, thousands of local companies, including banks, went bust and the credit system partly collapsed, preventing farmers from borrowing. In a paper Bignon co-wrote for the European Central Bank earlier this year, he shows a parallel with the recent bank bailouts: when French companies had access to a nearby branch of the central bank, which would take on their debt, it .
Rural France may now have recovered from the effects of the blight, but it took a long time. Property crime levels remained high in wine-dependent regions for decades, and the blight lives on in the collective memory, in tales of families uprooted and livelihoods ruined. “There are many family stories of upheaval a few generations ago,” says Bignon. For good and ill, though, the wine returned.
The Ebola of Olive Trees
Some 150 years after the Great French Wine Blight (see main story), European vines are under threat from another disease that originated in the Americas. A bacterium known as Xylella fastidiosa causes Pierce’s disease, in which the plants’ transport vessels become blocked, cutting the supply of water and nutrients to the leaves.
California’s Department of Food and Agriculture spends about $40 million a year to control the leaf-hopping insects known as sharpshooters that carry the bacteria from plant to plant in that region. Without that outlay, the annual cost to the wine industry could be northwards of $250 million, says Alberto Acedo of biotech firm Biome Makers in San Francisco.
Not so fastidious
The bacterium doesn’t just hit vines – in the Americas it also strikes citrus and coffee plants. Now X. fastidiosa has reached Europe, where it has earned another name – the “Ebola of olive trees”. In 2013, it was spotted in a few olive trees in southern Italy, and by 2015 had infected up to a million trees there with what has become known as olive quick decline syndrome, causing withering, desiccation and death. That same year, the blight reached Corsica and mainland France, and since then Germany as well as Spain, the world’s largest producer of olives according to the .
So far, 359 plant species in Europe have been identified as being vulnerable to X. fastidiosa, including peaches, sycamore, lavender and rosemary. Some show no symptoms, acting as reservoirs for the bacteria. Others wither quickly. Short of controlling insect species that could spread the various strains, no cure is yet known.
Generally cold winters slow the spread of Pierce’s disease in the US. That might mean northern Europe will escape unscathed. But as the planet warms, there is every chance the disease’s ranges could change or increase. “Some say there is a relationship between climate change and the increasing virulence of Xylella fastidiosa strains,” says Acedo.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The grape depression”
