Pierced and Corked

Lurking beneath that wine industry are horrors trying to kill it.

I'm just helping a neighbor, said the young man. That's why I'm pouring wine tonight. But this isn't my real job.

And what would that be, we asked.

Ramon explained that he just recently started in a new position with the Department of Agriculture, the mission of which was to keep the glassy-winged sharpshooter out of Napa and Sonoma counties.

I love the vineyards and the wine industry, he said, so it's the kind of thing I really like doing.

Everyone in the wine industry knows and fears this blight-carrying pest, and Alan Deutschman, author of the book, "A Tale of Two Valleys," went so far as to predict the end of the wine world because of it. Since his book showed an amount of research consistent with a long weekend in the area, and his source for the predicted catastrophe was just one expert cited almost as an afterthought, we're not too worried.

But it is a very real problem, and we were pleased to have an opportunity to discuss the issue with the guy serving wine at the not-so-exciting party.

He described a complicated-sounding campaign that consists at his level of teams of inspectors--like himself--meeting every truck that shows up at a local nursery from out of the area, and inspecting every leaf on every plant. They hold the plants up to the light, and look at the undersides of the leaves; what they're searching for is a couple of short, fat little white lines reaching in from the edges of the leaves. These show up easily when held to the light, he said, and they indicate egg clusters; if allowed to hatch, the little devils will start flying around and infecting with Pierce's disease the plants they visit, which eventually kills off the vine.

Some months back, we were thumbing through the archives at Bartholomew Park's replica of the house built by Agoston Haraszthy, founder of the Buena Vista Viticultural Society and one of the godfathers of the modern wine industry. We came upon some articles, letters and notes compiled by someone affiliated with the establishment in the late 1870s, long after Haraszthy died, and not long before the first Buena Vista Winery went under. The old documents conveyed a sense of desperation by virtue of their ubiquity alone. The winery manager was reading everything he could about phylloxera, the root blight that devastated France and the United States in the last decades of that century; there were yellowed newspaper clippings from here and abroad dealing with the pest, along with translations someone had made. There were letters as well; we saw one translated from French that contended that growing strawberries near vineyards might eliminate the problem. The little spiders that seemed to like the strawberries perhaps ate the miniscule mites that attacked the vines.

None of the fixes worked, and for several decades winery after winery went out of business as the pest moved along. Ultimately, a solution was found: grafting the desirable French varieties onto roots from America. Since the mites seem to have originated in the New World, the native root stock was resistant. The discovery saved the long-term wine industry, perhaps, but countless numbers of people and businesses were ruined.

Harazsthy himself lost his position at his own winery when it was suspected that his experimental planting techniques killed off the vines; in retrospect, we can attribute the problems to phylloxera, but no one knew that at the time. Haraszthy went bankrupt and traveled to Nicaragua to start over; he seems to have been eaten by an alligator before getting very far. Indirectly, phylloxera killed him, as well as his wife, who had previously succumbed to a tropical disease.

The Bourn family suffered as well; they played a big role in building Greystone, the massive stone edifice that houses the Culinary Institute of America just north of St. Helena. They'd intended to make some money storing wine for local vintners while at the same time trying to break the monopoly of San Francisco wine brokers who perennially short-changed the producers. The combination of phylloxera and new, higher federal taxes almost destroyed the family fortune they made from a gold mine.

On the surface, raising vines and making wine is the simplest thing in the world. Grow decent grapes, pick and crush them at the right time, keep the juice in clean vessels and then let it sit around for a while, and you should have a decent wine. But there are so many pitfalls, and even after years of demystification the wine industry still finds new, unpleasant surprises.

Just a few days after talking to Ramon about the sharpshooter we encountered a friend who told the most remarkable story about a winery in Sonoma.

A few years ago, one of the killer critics asked for some wine to sample and review. A short time later, without explanation, the critic asked them to send another batch. Not long after, he wrote an article for one of the make or break magazines in which he convincingly contended that all of their wines suffered from cork taint. This would have been enough to crush most wineries for good, but this one had a backer with exceedingly deep pockets; he sponsored research into the phenomenon at UC Davis and they discovered the problem.

It turns out that the chemical that infects the cork and makes the wine go bad is a by-product of contact between chlorine bleach and wood. Once created, it takes to the air easily, and will inhabit every pore on every porous surface. Wooden barrels are an essential feature of winemaking, and chlorine bleach was once considered essential to maintain cleanliness. Now we learn that this agent of sanitation introduces new problems where there were none before.

Our friend went on to note that French winemakers almost never had a problem with corked wines until the 1960s and '70s, when they started paying attention to modern research that suggested that cleanliness might be the single most important factor in avoiding the production of a bad wine. After introducing the chlorine bleach to their wood heavy environments, they began having problems with cork taint.

The first part of the solution, we hear, is to reduce the use of wood to an absolute minimum, limiting it to barrels. Part two? Do not allow clorine bleach on the property.

Talk about rich irony. In seeking to avoid the vague dangers of uncleanliness, the French introduced a very real new scourge to their industry, all at the behest of experts. A hundred years before that, other experts insisted that Buena Vista's failing vines died because they were planted too close together. Now we know such density typically makes for lower yields of better fruit, while the killing was done by an almost invisible insect of which all were unaware for years after the die-offs began.

Enter the glassy-winged sharpshooter, attended by a variety of experts whose advice often conflicts. We don't envy the people who have to discern the good advice from the bad, and we hope they choose wsely.

Even if you have no stake in the wine industry, you want it to do well if you enjoy the rural splendors of the wine country. If the land can't make money as vineyards, it can certainly make fortunes as real estate; but endless rows of houses don't provide the same charms as endless rows of vines.


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Copyright WineMerchant.com 2006