TEXAS Saves Wine Industry



http://www.pouilly-fume.com/
Root Destroying
Phylloxera

 In the early 1860s, a group of winemakers from southern France had a number of native vines from the US east coast dug up and transplanted into their vineyards. They wanted to know if the Native American table grape species (Vitis labrusca) could produce quality grapes for wine production on French soil. What they didn’t know is that they likely enabled one of the greatest ecological disasters we’ve ever known. It’s believed that in the soil (with the imported Vitis labrusca) they transported tiny insects called phylloxera (a nearly microscopic insect that feeds on the roots and leaves of grape vines – native to the soils of eastern United States). While Vitis labrusca had developed a natural resistance to phylloxera, Vitis vinifera (wine grape vines) was completely vulnerable. Because France was nearly every region’s source for transplanted Vitis vinifera, the world’s inventory of vineyards were nearly destroyed before the epidemic was even discovered.

   

Roughly 20 years later (in the 1880s), a horticulturalist named Thomas Munson in Denison, Texas (previously educated in agricultural sciences at what would become the University of Kentucky) developed rootstocks that resisted phylloxera and adapted well to a variety of different soils that could be grafted onto with wine grape cuttings. By the late 1880s, thousands of bundles of NORTH TEXAS rootstocks were being shipped to the wine making world [including France where Munson was named a chevalier (and/or knight) for his efforts that saved the vineyards of Europe], and grape growers were able to begin grafting their wine grape vines onto them.

So does that mean that nearly all of the wine grape vines in the world are partially rooted here in TEXAS? Things that make you go… “Hmm”