In the mid-19th century, trade between Europe and America intensified. Botanists imported native vine varieties from America as a curiosity, or to produce table grapes. Unfortunately, these vines did not make the journey alone. The pathogens that were dependent on them quickly found an inexhaustible source of food in European vines.

L’oïdium Powdery mildew was the first American disease observed in Europe. It appeared in 1845 on the banks of the Thames, where a new vine variety from America, Isabella, had just been introduced. Five years later, powdery mildew was present throughout France, Italy, Spain, and even as far away as the Maghreb countries!

In 1863, a few dead vines were discovered in the Gard region, before another outbreak broke out in the Bouches-du-Rhône region. The eminent botanist Jules-Emile Planchon was dispatched to the site. He pulled up a few stumps and discovered a tiny lemon-yellow aphid on their roots, which he named Phylloxera vastatrixEquipped with a powerful rostrum, the insect sucked the roots of the vine until the sap was exhausted. Its reproductive cycle was extremely rapid. Ten years later, the entire southern half of France was affected. Phylloxera would soon spread throughout Europe, where it would carry out its devastating work.

To add insult to injury for the winegrowers, two other diseases, also of American origin, soon appeared; the first mildew damage was observed in 1878, and it was black rot that began to destroy the harvests in 1885.

Faced with the scale of the catastrophe, all possible solutions were tried, including the inoculation of cow urine or crayfish broth into the vine sap! Countless chapels were erected. But it was more prosaically sulfur that would soon prove its effectiveness against powdery mildew, copper against downy mildew (the famous Bordeaux mixture), and it was the rootstock technique, which consisted of grafting the French vine (the scion) onto the American vine (the rootstock), that would save the vine from the terrible ravages of phylloxera.

From all these crises, the vineyards emerged profoundly disrupted. Their surface area fell from 2,400,000 hectares before the appearance of phylloxera, to 1,700,000 hectares at the beginning of the 20th century. The transformation of the winegrower's profession was no less spectacular. They were engaged in a constant chemical battle against these new aggressors of the vine, a battle that has continued uninterrupted for 150 years now.

As soon as American diseases arrived, some attentive observers noticed that those who had brought the disease seemed to be more resistant to it. In 1869, a landowner in the Bordeaux region who had built up a collection of American grape varieties reported the resistance of some of them to powdery mildew and phylloxera.

The idea then came to minds to cross French vines and American vines, in the hope of creating new varieties, which would inherit the taste qualities of their French parent, and the resistance to pathogens of their American progenitor. The technique of cross-pollination had already been experimented with other cultivated species such as the rosebush, and was quickly mastered. The true pioneers of vine hybridization in France were Georges Couderc and Albert Seibel, both from Ardèche. Their varieties quickly became very widely distributed among winegrowers during the first half of the 20th century, the golden age of the cultivation of "hybrid vines".

American diseases profoundly destabilized the wine economy of the late 19th century. Supply collapsed in a vineyard in complete collapse. To replace the wine that was lacking, people began to drink beer and cider, creating new consumption habits that threatened the wine market. It is therefore understandable why winemakers urgently needed to rebuild their vineyards. At the beginning of the 20th century, hybrid vines occupied 50,000 hectares. These were mainly grape varieties imported from America, such as Noah and Clinton, planted hastily in the midst of the phylloxera crisis, which would soon be criticized for their foxy taste.

The eagerness of winegrowers to replant is matched by the eagerness of hybridizers to offer them new resistant varieties. The choice is so wide that farmers are no longer growing grape varieties, but "numbers", as they now call them! The "5455" (variety resulting from the 54th sowing of the 55th row of the Seibel experimental plot!), the "7120" (from the hybridizer Couderc who planted more than 150,000 seeds in his test plots), the Oberlin "595", the Baco 22A etc.

By 1914, the area of ​​hybrid vines had doubled to 100,000 hectares. The damage was exacerbated by the lack of copper solutions reserved for military use. After the First World War, many farmers had died and there was a shortage of labor. The cultivation of resistant grape varieties was favored and the area doubled in 15 years. The following decade saw their growth continue, still under the influence of mildew, as in 1932, or on the contrary, when the context turned to overproduction, which caused the price of wines to fall, as in 1934 and 1935, when winegrowers saw in these less expensive varieties to cultivate a possibility of reducing their production costs.

During the Second World War, the cultivation of resistant grape varieties continued to progress. This was further encouraged by two years of very intense mildew, 1948 and 1957, but also by the terrible winter of 1956, whose severe frosts caused the death of millions of vines, whose hybrids fared better than French vines.

This is how the first real national wine census, carried out in 1958, recorded 400,000 hectares of hybrid vines, 30% of the vineyard at the time! And this figure was certainly underestimated, given the growing hostility towards hybrid vines, some of their owners made false declarations.

Although the vineyards lost 30% of their surface area after their reconstruction, their overall production increased. This increase was largely due to the new Languedoc plantations that moved from the steep hillsides to the fertile plains where large harvests were produced. Hérault, Gard, the Pyrénées Orientales, and Aude, whose dominant position was strengthened by the railway that now connected them to Paris and other major consumer centers, now alone produced 40% of the national harvest. These years saw the birth of the Algerian vineyard. Thousands of winegrowing families from the Midi and the Rhône Valley, ruined by phylloxera and powdery mildew, to whom the State and its colonialist ambitions offered travel, land, and herds, crossed the Mediterranean to participate in its construction. In 1876, Algeria had 16,700 hectares of vines. In 1914, the Algerian vineyard covered 150,000 hectares!

" We know the rest ", writes historian Marcel Lachiver in the work he devoted to the history of French vineyards, " Algerian wine, which was initially a blessing for French consumption, very quickly became a structural handicap in the market; of high alcohol content, it pushed Languedoc to ease by multiplying Aramon, the alcoholic balance of these two wines being reestablished in the port of Sète. From being complementary, it became a competitor when the overproduction crisis came and, until the 1960s, the French wine market dragged the difficulties of this vineyard born from scratch like a ball and chain. "

From a shortage of supply in a failing vineyard, French viticulture has moved in just a few years to surplus production. With the distillation of surpluses now contested by the increasingly powerful sugar beet lobby, solutions must be found to reduce supply. Some soon see the eradication of hybrid vines as one possible solution.

The emergence of controlled designations of origin, appellations created against a backdrop of conflict between winegrowers, who campaigned for a geographical origin of the grapes in appellation wines, and merchants, who primarily defended a know-how that freed them from this obligation in their grape purchases, a conflict from which the winegrowers emerged victorious, led to a reduction in the number of grape varieties in local production. This 1919 law, known as the Capus law, was amended in 1927 and, in its Article 3, prohibited the cultivation of hybrids in appellation areas.

The second French law targeting hybrids was the law of August 4, 1929, prohibiting the sweetening of hybrid musts.

A new warning shot was fired in 1934, on the evening of December 24, with the promulgation of the ban on hybrid grape varieties of American origin, which were among the first cultivated in France: Noah, Isabelle, Othello, Clinton, Jacquez and Herbemont. They then occupied 100,000 hectares and produced between 6 and 7 million hectoliters of wine.

The French government soon encouraged the abandonment of the cultivation of other hybrid grape varieties through grubbing-up premiums; hybrids were excluded from the subsidy schemes, and their planting rights were reduced by 30%. A decree of September 10, 1953, defined departmental classifications of grape varieties within the framework of the new legislation revising "the wine-growing status." Three categories of grape varieties were defined: recommended, authorized, and tolerated. The latter, to which the majority of hybrid varieties belong, must be grubbed up before September 1, 1975. " Any winegrower with a hybrid vine in his plot must renounce the appellations for his entire harvest ," the regulation specifies, which will become effectively effective by decree on October 22, 1987.

Although the first obstacles to the cultivation of hybrid vines date back to the 1920s, they continued to progress until the early 1960s. How can this paradox be explained?

It is undoubtedly that the decline of hybrids is more linked to the transformation of society after the Second World War, than to the desire of the state and the "wine aristocracy" to see them disappear. Once reconstruction was completed, the industry needed labor and the rural exodus, which had begun in the 19th century, accelerated brutally. Agriculture modernized at a rapid pace, driven by a dirigiste state. The first tractors paid for by the Marshall Plan arrived in France. In 1962, the first agricultural orientation law was passed. We then witnessed the tremendous development of agricultural modernization and specialization. The consequences; more productive, more intensive, more uniform farms. And larger too. In twenty years, the land lost 40% of its farmers and 70% of its employees. In 1975, the agricultural population represented only 10% of the workforce. Land consolidation, a corollary of this forced modernization, where the size and topography of plots must adapt to the development of machinery, profoundly changes rural geography. Countless hedges, orchards and isolated plots of vines are uprooted, including an overwhelming proportion of hybrid vines, formerly cultivated by farmers in mixed farming, who have become "farmers", cereal growers here, livestock breeders there, and where "specialization" has become the watchword of agriculture.

In French agriculture, the first use of molecules produced by the chemical industry was arsenic against the Colorado potato beetle in 1942. Shortly after its creation in 1946, INRA activated the promotion of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, which became an important resource for modernizing agriculture. Technological and scientific investments aimed to make these new inputs easy to use; With this ease of use now offered by mechanization, many chemical molecules appeared, fungicides, insecticides, nematicides and other herbicides that would be widely used in viticulture and whose effectiveness would henceforth put the interest of the natural resistance of hybrid vines into perspective. We are still far from suspecting the deleterious effects of the use of these new substances.

Banned from AOCs and collateral victims of the profound transformation of the agricultural world and French society, hybrid vines occupied in 2010 only 10,000 of the 400,000 hectares recorded in 1958, and even then, they continued to disappear as the old farmers who strove to maintain them for their own consumption no longer had the strength.

" " Hybridization has awakened this old dream that man carries in his heart: to become the equal of the gods. Nurserymen, confectioners, university professors, country priests, polytechnicians, even simple winegrowers, have thus felt developing within them this desire to create or, to quote their own words, "to explore infinity" and "to sow the ideal ," wrote the ampelographer Louis Levadoux in 1951, in a book he devoted to the hybridization of the vine.

Four years after the publication of this book, the public authorities, in this same obsession with rationalizing agriculture in general and eradicating hybrid vines in particular, imposed such high financial provisions on the last private hybridizers for the approval of their new varieties that they were forced to put an end to their activities. From now on, only INRA breeders would be authorized to "explore infinity" and "sow the ideal." But they did nothing or very little, and the hybridization of vines in France experienced a long period of desertification, and it was not until the 1970s that INRA re-engaged on this path, through Alain Bouquet, whose varieties are still not accessible to winegrowers !

While post-war hostility toward hybrid vines was widely shared in Europe, some research institutes in neighboring countries never abandoned hybridization work. INRA must now work twice as hard to catch up, particularly with our German and Swiss neighbors.

Today, winegrowers are increasingly interested in hybrid varieties that are now called "resistant," the word hybrid being considered connotative, given the hope they offer of breaking free from our dependence on pesticides, the harmful effects of which we are becoming increasingly aware of every day. Is the phoenix ready to rise from its ashes?