The Phylloxera and the Changing Economy of Vinedressing

During the 1860s and 1870s, while Audois vinedressers and proprietors alike reaped the profits of expanding vineyards, winegrowers in the rest of France suffered the worst agricultural disaster in the history of French viticulture. Vineyards that formerly flourished under the Mediterranean sun now turned brown and bare as vine leaves yellowed and withered in the space of a few months. Winegrowers wrung their hands as harvests dwindled to nothing and debts mounted. The phylloxera, introduced into France on American vine cuttings, spread with alarming rapidity through the southeast and more slowly through the southwest. By 1871 it had destroyed nearly all of the vines in the Vaucluse and the Gard, and by 1875 much of those in the Hérault as well. Small growers and large, artisans and local merchants, railway men and bankers—all suffered. The ruinous insect recognized no class boundaries. Winegrowers in the Aude, temporarily spared, profited both from the rising wine prices that resulted from short supplies (as high as 50 francs per hectoliter in some areas) and from a virtual monopoly of the southern wine market. From 1878 to 1884 the Aude's income from wine was three times what it had been in the period of prosperity before the phylloxera.^[2] In the summer of 1878, however, traces of damage appeared in the Audois villages of Ouveillan, Argelliers, Ginestas, and Mirepeisset. By 1882 one thousand hectares had been attacked; four years later over one hundred thousand hectares, 54 percent of the Audois vineyard, had been totally destroyed.^[3] Wine production in the Aude dropped drastically, from almost five million hectoliters in 1882 to just short of two million in 1887.^[4] Although the nationwide economic depression

closed down workshops in the west of the department, the bulk of the Aude's industrial depression in these years resulted from the phylloxera, which affected the building trades and cooperage.^[5] Entire families, financially ruined by the disaster, departed for Algeria or for industrial centers. The somber streets of vinegrowing villages, houses dotted with "For Sale" signs, could not have contrasted more sharply with the gaiety and abandon of just a few years earlier.

In some ways winegrowers in the Aude fared better than their counterparts in other Mediterranean departments. They could use profits accumulated in the l870s to replant and treat their vines, and they were able to take advantage of methods of prevention and treatment proven effective elsewhere by the early 1880s.^[6] Moreover, the government had by now begun to grant vineyard owners subsidies for treatment and to free them from land taxes.^[7] But Audois vignerons could not entirely escape the ruinous cost of treating damaged vines. The least expensive remedy, spraying with carbon sulfide, cost 180 to 200 francs per hectare. Submersion of vines in water from irrigation canals that drew on the Aude River was more reliable but also more expensive, costing up to 1,800 francs per hectare. And replanting a vineyard entirely in sandy soil, where the phylloxera could not survive, required between 2,500 and 3,500 francs per hectare.^[8] Despite government subsidies to local associations formed to fight the phylloxera, the amounts landowners received amounted to only a fraction of the total cost required.^[9] Still, southern wine producers became increasingly dependent on government assistance, a fact that made Audois winegrowers sympathetic to state economic intervention and powerfully influenced their politics.

The high costs of replanting and treatment of phylloxera-stricken vines, however, were only part of the problem. Vineyard owners who replanted had to wait four years for new vines to become fully productive. Moreover, annual production costs were rising, partly because of a change in the entrepreneurial mentality of southern winegrowers.

Vignerons ' desperate efforts to rebuild the vineyards of the golden age led to more intensive cultivation and an attempt to raise yields by adding new procedures to the traditional tech-

niques of vinedressing. Unlike industries such as glassmaking and textiles, in which the introduction of more sophisticated technologies toward the end of the nineteenth century standardized and simplified production methods, vinedressing became increasingly complex.^[10] Vinedressers now fertilized their vines more aggressively and began to graft French grape stalks to phylloxera-resistant American vine roots, with instructional assistance from local agricultural associations.^[11] Vineyard owners uniformly planted high-yield varieties and cut their alcoholically weak wines (7–9°) with more alcoholic Algerian wines (13–14°). They also practiced chaptalisation more aggressively, adding sugar and hot water to the residue left in the vats after the wine had been drawn off to produce a second fermentation.^[12] Normally it was illegal to market these second wines, or piquettes , but in the 1880s and 1890s the government overlooked those who did so, even sanctioning the practice by lowering the sugar tax and by legalising the use of sugar to make third and sometimes fourth or fifth wines. The state thus supported the new entrepreneurial mentality of the post-phylloxera winegrower, which favored quantity over quality.^[13]

Despite these innovations, however, no mechanical revolution played a part in the reconstitution of the southern vineyards. Workers continued to perform virtually all tasks by hand, simply incorporating new chemical treatments and skills such as grafting into their repertoire. Rising costs now made vineyards capital-intensive as well as labor-intensive operations. Whereas contemporaries estimated that in the 1860s and 1870s annual costs of production would amount to 340 francs per hectare of mature vines for pruning, cultivation, sulphuring, harvesting, and winemaking, by 1892 that figure had risen to around 1,000 francs per hectare, taking into account additional chemical treatment, fertilizer, grafting, and more aggressive pruning.^[14] Needless to say, large vineyard owners, especially estate owners, could more easily handle these changes than small ones. Les grands could purchase chemicals and equipment in bulk, and hence more cheaply, and could also benefit from preferential rail transport rates. Most had sufficient reserve capital to meet higher production costs as well.

These changes irrevocably transformed the nature of south-

ern vinegrowing in three ways. First, they accentuated the cleavages between large growers and small—between grande and petite bourgeoisie . Second, they paved the way for the "industrialization" of southern viticulture. As one contemporary observer commented, "This [is] no longer the gardening of laborious peasants; it [is] industrial agriculture, demanding continual care, scrupulous vigilance, broad knowledge, and considerable capital."^[15] Third, they dramatically changed the southern wine market.