phylloxera – Wine, Culture & Society

DO Baragioeu – Another Unexpected Italian Wine

Published on 25th Apr 202228th Apr 2022 by stevechartersmwLeave a comment

(Thanks to Nicole Mascioli for help with this post).

Anyone who has followed my blog recently will be aware of my obsession with northern Italian wines made from no longer legal grape varieties (see my last two posts). This prompted one of my Italian students in Dijon, Nicole, to talk to me about her experience with similar types of wine in the town she grew up in. This is Cuggiono, about 30 kms from Milan and in the Ticino valley at the border of Lombardy and Piedmont. It’s a place where there used to be many vineyards until phylloxera yet, as happened in much of Europe (even where I live in Burgundy) most of them reverted to waste land and forest or other agricultural use after the insect plague. Cuggiono is the only town locally to maintain this viticultural heritage. It is on the Ticino which carves out a national park in the area, and it is where Nicole’s parents and grandfather were raised as well. She generously spent some time doing local research on this heritage for me.

The vines all disappeared from the 1920s onwards, but in 1982 the local historical museum in the town decided to recreate the old wines which were made there, and which formed part of the village’s cultural history. There was a conscious effort to replicate the former styles of wine, but 60 years on many of the people who promoted the idea knew nothing of viticulture; however, a local professional agronomist was part of the team and advised them. This, then, was a group of older people who were proud of their identity (and they still are) and wanted to remember it before it was completely forgotten.

By the 1980s the use of American grape varieties was banned in Italy for making wine except for personal use. Many people, including Nicole’s grandmother, had been persuaded the banning of these grapes was due to the health danger they posed, so she pulled up her grapes, incorrectly thinking they were harmful (even though she was no longer making wine with them and it was only a small plot). This was the same year, however, that some locals, based around the town’s historical museum, decided to recreate the wine so that the tradition did not die. The found some local vines and used them to plant a vineyard in the public gardens of the town and, subsequently began to make wine. Children do the foot pressing in a plastic vat; they used to do this in the past as their pressing was softer than adults (weight) and more could get in the tub at once. Meanwhile, the adults harvest and manage the fermentation and bottling. Nicole helped with the vintage at times when she was younger.

Initially the blend was Clinton and Fragolino with some other traditional local varieties. However, the latter didn’t work soe well, and now it includes some freisa (an indigenous piemontese variety with rather bitter tannins but attractive soft red fruit aromas) plus cabernet France (as it resists mildew well) as well as the fragolino (which comes from the Veneto), and clinton. The wine is not to be recommended for those searching for elegance and complexity; however, for its creators it is not about crafting a good wine – but shaping ‘their’ wine. This is about maintaining a fading collective memory or the reinvention of a tradition ‘rooted in our way of being’. Typically the wine is drunk with pan tramvai, a local dried fruit bread. So not just the production, but the consumption also seeks to maintain the heritage.

By 2020 they were bottling 500 bottles. The wine has an has an invented label – it is entitled ‘Baragioeu DO’ (not ‘DOC’ – the standard Italian PDO designation, which would be illegal). Baragioeu is a dialect word for ‘wine. The label also records that this bottle is from the is the ‘38^th anniversary’. My bottle is numbered 358/500. Because it is an illegal wine it can’t be sold so the museum kindly gave me a bottle.

Clinton II

Published on 4th Mar 2022 by stevechartersmw1 Comment

This is a follow-up to my previous post about clinton – the almost unknown grape of North American origin which has found a new home in parts of northern Italy. My colleague in Dijon, Lara Agnoli, who hails from one of the villages where the grape was historically grown, very kindly used her contacts (i.e. her mother-in-law!) to talk to some of the older locals who traditionally used clinton to make wine. She recorded the discussions which give a lot more insight into how the residents felt about the variety and the wines they make from it. Most of the information comes from two brothers who have independently made wines.

In fact, they mainly make a wine which they call ‘clinto’. I think this is probably clinton – but they use that name (spelt clintòn) for a grape which they distinguish as being more tannic and bitter; this, I suspect, is just another clone of the same variety – and given how tannic and bitter the clinto is then the wine from the clintòn variant must be completely undrinkable. They say that the grape is often blended with another variety which they call seipe. I wonder if this is a synonym for isabella – with a sweet, jellyish aroma – but my friend Lara says that it isn’t. I’ve not been able to trace any reference to it in and searches I’ve made. Isabella is also called fragola in northern Italy. It produces high levels of methanol (very toxic alcohol) rather than the less-toxic ethanol which is more common in most wine (made from vitis vinifera). The planting of isabella was banned in France in the 1930s because of this toxicity and it was grubbed up compulsorily in the 1950s because it was perceived to be so dangerous, but it still exists in this part of Italy.

The brothers said that their father planted these grapes in the early 1920s – that will have been immediately after the crisis caused by phylloxera in the villages. They imply that he was given the variety to propagate because locals could not afford to buy new vines and it was also planted in other parts of the Veneto like Padua and Vicenza. As I noted in the last post on this subject, clinto/clintòn resisted phylloxera due to its American roots. The locals quickly took to it. The vines were reproduced by layering (they noted that nearly everyone grew clinton at the time) and probably the fact that it was not one of the grapes used by rich local landowners and the large wine businesses around Verona made it attractive as a symbol of their independence. Historians talk of ‘the invention of tradition’ – the creation of a story with what seems to be an ancient origin (perhaps reflecting vaguely what may have happened in the past but more often an idealised dream of what it should have been). Clinto/clintòn quickly became one of these invented traditions. The fact that you could reproduce it by layering offered more continuity with previous centuries of wine-making than the fact that it was American contradicted that continuity. The tradition was cheap wine made on the farm rather than an ancient heritage of indigenous Veronese grapes. The brothers also note that they tried ‘French’ grapes at some stage; however, whilst they were good to eat they made poor wine – as did merlot (seen to be Italian rather than French as it has grown there for at least 170 years). The rich soils of the plain here may have promoted excess vine growth and overcropping.

Around Verona, we were told, the wines made from these grapes were in contrast to the ‘worked’ wines made by the large companies. They were artisanal, fermented in large vats then stored in glass demijohns. They sold the wines to relatives and a few friends. ‘They were fighting to get it’ we were told! Maybe that was due to the price; it was sold for 500 lire a litre (about 25 eurocents).

There is a festival in early October in one local village to celebrate the wines made from the grape. This, however, will be completely different from most wine festivals around the world. Those tend to be inclusive, welcoming visitors (if only because they have a marketing and promotional dimension). This will be about reinforcing community identity, maintaining ties to the communal past and educating local residents about social ties, loyalty and the need for solidarity. It will specifically not want external participants because it is the threat of the outside and a world which is changing that will be the focus of the celebration. So, it makes me want to go there, to see how it operates! However, the ‘worked’ wines from the large companies slowly became more affordable (as the population became wealthier) and fewer locals wanted to buy the villagers’ hand-made, ‘authentic’, offerings. Meanwhile the family needed to buy treatments for the vines to deal with mildew and that became more and more expensive. The brothers’ father went on making the wines until about 1984 /85. They stopped as it was too hard to sell anymore. Yet they kept one vine to remember their father by, as it was his wine, and they reproduce it by layering canes in the soil and letting them root. However, even this vine is harder and harder to keep alive; it doesn’t like the erratic weather that has come with climate change; the humidity and heat is causing the layering to fail. Thus we have an invented tradition – one which has only existed about 100 years but which probably reinforces thousands of years of peasant rebellion against authority alongside communality and rural cohesion – yet which is fading to a close.

Wine in the Time of Pestilence V

Published on 11th Jun 2020 by stevechartersmw2 Comments

My last few posts have explored how the Covid-19 pandemic is intersecting with different cultural and social norms to change people’s attitudes to and behaviour with wine. The danger hasn’t passed but many countries are at the point of leaving lockdown or confinement. Thus, although we aren’t at that point yet, in the next few posts I’m keen to explore how the world of wine may change in the post-pandemic world. However, first I want to ponder a little bit of history. This isn’t just because I like history; I’m hoping it may also set a bit of the framework for the next three or four posts I’m planning (so for those who really don’t like history, stay tuned for my next post). I’ve already written briefly about Phylloxera in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic – but I think that a further exploration of how it changed wine, wine consumption and the wine industry, may be helpful in thinking about how the current plague may reshape our world. Phylloxera, of course, was an insect and not a disease, and whilst it devastated vineyards it was never dangerous to humans as Covid-19 is; no one died from its activity. Nevertheless, within the very limited world of wine production its impact was overwhelming, undermining established businesses and transforming everything from viticultural methods to regional reputations and market preferences. However, I would suggest that its major impact was not revolutionary; it overturned nothing. Rather it was a catalyst; it did nothing new but accelerated what was already happening.

This is best explored by looking at the Champagne region (although it had a similar impact throughout Europe). Phylloxera arrived in the southern part of Champagne in 1888 but it took another four years for it to get to the centre of the vineyard area. It spread slowly there, so only reached its peak a little before the First World War.

In 1888 champagne was produced from a large area – somewhere around 50,000 hectares of vineyard land (but down from perhaps 80,000 a few decades before). Despite the success of the fizz on international markets over the previous 40 years wine production in the region was of predominantly still, red (or deep pink) wine. It might be made for local consumption or sold quite cheaply, mainly locally and in northern France, including Paris, as well as Belgium. Yet, it was comparatively expensive to produce in a cooler climate; yields were much lower than now and the cold meant that vintage variation was substantial, both in quality and quantity. Since the railway link between Paris and Languedoc had been finished less than 40 years before southern French wine producers, blessed with sunshine that offered consistent, large volumes, had been selling cheaper, red wine to the metropolis, made from high-yielding varieties like aramon and carignan.

The vineyards in Champagne were owned by small-scale growers (sometimes farmers rather than just vignerons) and they would have seemed – to modern eyes – a mess, with vines planted higgledy-piggledy in the vineyard at many more plants per hectare than the current 10,000. When you needed a new vine, you buried the shoot from an existing plant, let it root, then cut it off from the mother (the same system is still used in some parts of the world – notably Santorini). The grapes included all the ones known today (though without so much chardonnay) but also such lower quality varieties as alicante and gouais.

Sparkling wine, although the minority of production, was growing, produced by the négociant elite who became wealthy on the back of its success. The vignerons, of course, could not afford the capital needed to produce fizz, nor could they afford to leave it in their cellars for a few years to mature. Increasingly there were disputes between the négociants and the growers: the former focusing on branding (and willing to be fuzzy about exactly where ‘champagne’ came from in order to keep the raw material cheap) and the latter seeking to defend the economic territory from which their grapes came and concerned to push the price up given the success of the sparkling wine.

So, what changed after the insect destroyed the vineyards? The first thing was that many small growers – already impoverished as the négociants were paying them so little – gave up. Planting new vines from cuttings cost nothing: buying Phylloxera-resistant rootstocks was expensive, and they could not afford it. The contraction of the vineyard, already taking place, was accelerated. Many sites became arable or root-cropped and if land had good potential as vineyard it was bought by those with money: négociants and richer growers.

Much of the land given up was planted with red grapes, and the supply of cheaper red wine, both locally and to Paris and Belgium, dried up – Languedoc had won the battle for the Parisian working man’s throat. The focus in Champagne evolved to be entirely on sparkling wine.

In turn, this augmented the power of the négociants as they had the capital to make, age, and export sparkling wine. And with that power they could press down even more the price paid for grapes from the growers – whose sole role now was to supply the négociants. In the longer term, moreover, it accelerated the development of grower cooperatives, which were being founded just as Phylloxera arrived.

What also happened, though, were a series of changes which were used to reinforce the quality and reputation of champagne – and thus justify the high price charged for it. The first of these was a long struggle (only really completed in the second quarter of the 20^th century) to rely only on the ‘quality’ grapes (chardonnay and the two pinots – noir and meunier) and push out the lesser varieties. This has become part of the mythology of champagne – that only these three will do for great wine.

Alongside this was the battle – again one which pre-existed Phylloxera – to determine what champagne is; that is, what it represents. Was it a style of wine, made by a well-known House, or was it wine made from a specific and clearly marked place? The latter view was that of the growers, because limiting the origin of the grapes preserved their scarcity and thus enhanced the growers’ bargaining power. In the end this was a battle the growers won (with the support of some of the more perceptive négociants who saw that to underline the reputation of the place Champagne would add other forms of value to their wine). Ultimately this focus on place as the defining character of wine (which was being articulated at the same time in some other French wine regions) led to the appellation system in the 1930s and the modern world’s focus on origin as a defining label for a wine (unlike, say, beers, or many spirits).

Thus, a pestilence changed champagne, and in turn shaped the modern world of wine. (For those who want to know more about this evolution there is a great book by an American historian, Kolleen Guy, When Champagne became French: Wine and the making of a national identity.) Phylloxera changed viticulture, industry structure, image management and wine styles. Yet the key point I’m making – and one which will give the context for my next posts – is that in the end the louse did nothing new; what it did was just accelerate the pace of change which was already happening. It was not a cause, it was a catalyst.