It is well known that an aphid called phylloxera vastatrix, which attacked French vineyards in the second half of the nineteenth century, had a profound impact on the country’s wine industry. The fact that it also almost killed the cognac category and that its lasting effects can be felt to this day is much less appreciated. In this article, we will look in detail into how the spread of the deadly louse originating from North America has reshaped the world of spirits.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, brandy from Charente enjoyed unprecedented growth. The surface of the region planted with vines has extended from 207,000 hectares in 1829 to 249,000 in 1856, which represented 11% of French vineyards. Sales also increased steadily – between the restoration of 1815 and installation of the Second Empire in the early 1850s they had risen from 52,000 to nearly 200,000 hectolitres a year. This expansion accelerated with the accession of Napoleon III, whose liberal commercial policies have stimulated economic growth in France and had a very positive impact on the cognac trade.
Photo of Napoleon III by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (ca.1860). Fondation Napoléon, Paris
One of the first priorities for the new monarch was the modernisation of the country’s economy, which by the mid-nineteenth century have fallen significantly behind that of the United Kingdom and Germany. Political economics had long been a passion of the Emperor, with ideas of liberalization and free trade being of particular interest to him. This is, for example, what Louis Napoléon Bonaparte wrote to his minister of finance Achille Fould on January 5th, 1860:
The time has come to concern ourselves with the means of giving great impetus to the various branches of national wealth. For a long time, we have been proclaiming that we must multiply the means of exchange to make commerce flourish; that without competition the industry remains stationary and maintains high prices which oppose the progress of consumption; that without a prosperous industry which develops capital, agriculture remains in infancy. Everything therefore comes together in the successive development of the elements of public prosperity!
Various measures were taken by the government to liberalize the French economy: duties were lifted, restrictive regulations abolished, taxes lowered, and agricultural credit institutions created. All this signalled the coming of a golden age for cognac makers, as they turned out to be among the biggest beneficiaries of Napoleon III’s policies.
The most important development of the era concerned France’s trade with cognac’s biggest market – Great Britain. Starting from the 1820s, the British Isles consumed up to 90% of total output of such cognac houses as Hennessy and Hine; other firms were not that far behind. By 1849, the share of French brandy in the British spirits market reached one in twelve bottles. Brandy was the drink of English aristocracy and aspiring middle class, and it is hard to imagine a Victorian dinner party without large quantities of fine cognac. The produce of Charente distillers, however, did not necessarily end up in the United Kingdom exclusively as such.
Foxhunting: The Toast by Henry Thomas Alken (early 19th century). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
A lot of French brandy was exported to England immediately after distillation as unaged eaux-de-vie to be matured and stocked on British soil. The content of these casks was to be bottled and labelled by the London merchants, who then either sold this cognac on the domestic market or shipped it abroad under their own names. Evidently, they were interested in the removal of any obstacles in getting their hands on as much quality brandy from France as possible.
On January 23, 1860, everyone in the brandy trade rejoiced – the free trade agreement between Britain and France came into being. The treaty, prepared and signed by statesmen Richard Cobden and Michel Chevalier, ended tariffs on the main items of trade: wine, brandy and silk goods from France, and coal, iron, and industrial goods from Britain.
The Cobden–Chevalier Treaty contributed significantly to a further upturn in cognac’s fortunes: within less than ten years, the English demand for French brandy had increased by 46%, from 100,737 to 144,144 hectolitres. The enthusiasm of Cognac’s merchants can be sensed in a report presented by Auguste Hennessy during the viticultural congress held in Saintes on December 18, 1869:
What can we conclude, Gentlemen, from the examination we have just carried out? That the commercial treaty [with Great Britain] has been a great benefit to France and it must be maintained; that the development of free trade will contribute more and more to friendly relations, to the wealth and well-being of nations, since it will bring between them the exchange of the best products whose creation nature has facilitated within each of them. Our beautiful France has nothing to fear in this path of progress: the creator has showered his benefits on her; its exceptional soil and climate lend themselves wonderfully to the production of the best fruits of the earth.
Title page of Auguste Hennessy’s report at the viticultural congress held in Saintes on December 18, 1869. Archives de la bibliothèque municipale de Cognac
The advantages of free trade were so obvious that other countries followed suit in adopting its principles in their dealings with France. Belgium in 1861, Italy in 1863, Switzerland in 1864, Scandinavian countries and Spain in 1865, Austro-Hungary in 1866 have all lifted trade barriers for French goods. The opening of these markets had an additional positive effect on cognac industry.
Growth in international trade due to removal of tariffs was accompanied by transport revolution. From the middle of the nineteenth century, steam navigation started to supplant sailing. Steam ships could cross the Atlantic in 8-10 days, while Asia and Australia became reachable within three weeks. In addition to this gain in speed there was a significant increase in the tonnage of ships, which were now built from iron. Cognac began to be enjoyed literally all around the world.
The French market continued to be important, as well – throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the place of brandy grew to truly rival that of wine in people’s diet. As a result, between 1860 and 1866 sales here quadrupled. Paris remained the main consumption centre in France with around 70% of domestic shipments of cognac going to the capital. But as populations of other large cities expanded, their demand for spirits also grew.
Cognac railway station, inaugurated in 1867 (postcard from the era). Cercle philatélique de Cognac
The advent of railroads created additional opportunities for business in the interior of the country. Cognac houses actively participated in their construction: in 1862, when the Charente Railway Company was created for the building of the Angoulême-Cognac-Saintes-Rochefort line, six of the eighteen principal shareholders were large brandy merchants. Otard-Dupuy, Martell, and Hennessy each held 200 shares. In Jarnac, the railway company even bought the bridge across the Charente in order to circumvent the city toll – to persuade houses such as Hine, Bisquit, Courvoisier, Delamain, and Rémy Martin to ship their product by rail rather than by boat.
Taking advantage of this new reality, many trading firms have relocated closer to railway stations. The town of Cognac in particular assumed great importance, with even those houses that were previously based closer to the seashore (such as, for example, Prunier from Mortagne-sur-Gironde, or Pellison from Saint-Seurin-d'Uzet) moving their headquarters inland.
The warehouse of Pellisson Père & Co on Avenue de la Gare, opposite Cognac’s railway station (postcard from the era). Cercle philatélique de Cognac
Population of Cognac has exploded from 7,000 inhabitants in 1857 to over 12,000 in 1867, while shipments of eaux-de-vie soared to 421,330 hectolitres (1866). Unprecedented prosperity came to the region. Even small winegrowers with just a couple of hectares could make a good living; larger landowners suddenly found themselves extremely wealthy. Victorian journalist and a friend of Dickens, Henry Vizetelly, wrote at the time: “the peasantry of the arrondissement of Cognac are the richest in all France. Some few are worth as much as sixty thousand pounds sterling” (sixty thousand pounds in the 1860s are the equivalent of something around 4,200,000 euros in today’s money). The signs of this glorious past are still evident today: majestic municipal buildings from the era together with luxurious villas of brandy barons still stand in Cognac town centre as a visual reminder of the region’s heyday.
This promising picture was somewhat darkened by the Franco-Prussian War, which started in the summer of 1870 and ended just six months later with a disastrous defeat of the French. After the decisive battle of Sedan, Napoleon III was taken prisoner and forced to abdicate. Colossal reparations imposed on France by victorious Germans were to be paid through a substantial increase of the taxes on alcohol. In 1871, the circulation duty on wines and spirits rose by 66% (due to ‘national misfortunes’, as was officially communicated). Both orders and output fell dramatically.
Discussing the War in a Paris Café, a scene from Illustrated London News (September 17, 1870)
Cognac houses had to make an effort to maintain their business. The fact that most of them were oriented on the British market helped to stay afloat as the English continued to consume French brandy heavily, but the more general outlook was no longer so optimistic. Nevertheless, nobody could have possibly foreseen the catastrophe that awaited the cognac country over the course of the encroaching decade, by the end of which its vineyards were pretty much completely destroyed. The cause of the disaster was phylloxera vastatrix – a little louse that attacked the roots of the vine stock, provoking the formation of nodules that led to the plant’s asphyxiation and death.
Not that the region was spared by various vine diseases before that. In the 1850s, for instance, French brandy sales were temporarily hampered by the spread of oïdium, or powdery mildew – a fungus that causes a powdery growth on the surface of vine’s leaves and buds. However, a solution (dusting the vineyards with sulphur) was found relatively quickly, and by the end of the decade everything went back to normal.
Phylloxera’s impact on French wine and spirits industry was much more devastating and long-lasting. Unlike in the case of oïdium, it took years to identify an effective remedy and even more time to successfully implement it. In the interim, cognac category has suffered a blow from which it hasn’t really recovered to this day.
Poster Diseases of the vine: Phylloxera vastatrix (1870s). Collection Musées de Cognac
The almost microscopic sap-sucking aphid originated from North America and most likely had been brought from the United States with American vines, which European winegrowers were experimenting with after the oïdium outbreak during the late 1850s – early 1860s. In France, the signs of the new malady were first seen in 1863 in the department of Gard, in Languedoc. But it was not until 1868 that its nature was uncovered by a special commission appointed to inspect the stricken vineyards on the west bank of the Rhône. Here is how Jules-Émile Planchon, a botany professor from Montpellier who was a member of this commission and who gave phylloxera its name, recalls the discovery made when the roots of the dead vines were examined with the help of magnifying glass:
Suddenly under the magnifying lens of the instrument appeared an insect, a plant louse of yellowish colour, tight on the wood, sucking the sap. One looked more attentively; it is not one, it is not ten, but hundreds, thousands of pucerons that one perceived, all in various stages of development. They are everywhere: on the deepest roots as well on as the shallow, on the thick underground parts as well as on the most delicate rootlets… During three days we found – at every place the malady had attacked – these innumerable insects.
Carried by the wind in its winged form, phylloxera gradually spread around the country, affecting more and more vineyards. In 1873, the official declaration of its presence in Charente was made with the publication of a report made by French chemist Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbraudran (a Cognacais and the future discoverer of gallium) at the Paris Academy of Sciences, in which he mentions vines being attacked in Crouin, a suburb of Cognac. But despite the damage it was already causing elsewhere in France, winegrowers in the Cognac region at first didn’t realize how serious the threat was. Many considered the problem to be temporary and believed that it could be resolved easily, just as oïdium epidemic was a few years earlier. Those who already lost their vineyards replanted them again with the same varieties. Needless to say, these vines were also quickly annihilated by the merciless bug.
Map of districts in which the presence of phylloxera has been observed (1881), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
When the degree of devastation inflicted by the tiny invader became clear, it was already too late. In the following seven years, the size of the cognac vineyard dropped by more than three-quarters. Repetitive late frosts during the early 1880s completed category’s ruin by destroying most of the remaining crop. By the 1890s, the vineyard had shrunk from its peak at over 285,000 hectares to an average of 40,000 hectares – a seventh of its maximum extent.
This is how Henri Pissot, a cellar master in Jarnac, described in 1882 the miserable end of once celebrated vines:
Ah, these stumps, these poor vine stumps, are they not pitiful, piled up under the sheds and in the farmyards. You see them arranged in square blocks, trimmed, drawn into lines, ready to be sold by the meter: seven francs per meter, two or three hundred stumps which for half a century have flowed the family's fortune into the presses! Seven francs per meter, the innumerable legion of shrubs which made Croesus’ and Nabobs! Yes, seven francs per meter, for what annually yielded more wine than seven cows would yield milk…
A sketch by Barthélémy Gautier (1846-1893). The conversation between the two men goes: «Tell me, then, what was it that killed those vines? – They say it’s this devilish insect, a phylloc-scoundrel, I think, that’s how it is called!... It's very evil!...». Collection Musées de Cognac
The phylloxera crisis had terrible economic and social consequences. It literally wiped out many small-scale winegrowers who lived from harvest to harvest. Since such vignerons didn’t have any savings, they tried to get rid of their land – only to realize that its value had dropped by nine-tenths. In Grande Champagne, before the bug’s arrival a hectare would normally cost around seven thousand francs. After the onset of the plague, it was not more than six hundred... To survive, many had no choice but to sell their stills and market the produce of their grapes as wine, not brandy. Large cognac houses were slightly better off as their stocks allowed them to keep operating for a bit longer, but their profits also eventually fell almost to zero and it took the rest of the century for them to recover to the levels of the 1870s.
Agricultural workers were left with no jobs. Related industries suffered, too: for example, in 1873 some two thousand coopers had been employed in 200 workshops in town, ten years later there were 93 workshops employing a mere three hundred men. Blacksmiths, saddlers, masons all found themselves with no means to feed their families. Not surprisingly, a massive exodus from the region took place, with thousands of families having migrated to other parts of the country. By the end of the century, population of areas like Grande Champagne fell at least by a quarter.
The recovery only began after 1895. Until then, numerous ways of battling phylloxera were attempted, from flooding the vineyards to thumping the ground with special devices to scare off the pest. Neither of these have worked. Eventually, two influential fractions emerged among French viticulturalists: sulfuristes, that is, those who believed that the best solution was the injection of sulphur-based pesticides into the soil, and américanistes, who were in favour of replanting ravaged vineyards with American vines which were immune to the louse.
Treatment of vines with carbon disulphide, from J.-A. Barral, La lutte contre phylloxera (1884)
Pumping carbon disulphide into the ground ultimately proved to be too expensive and inefficient. The last hope remaining was to try American grape varieties, which were indeed not susceptible to phylloxera. However, the quality of their wines turned out to be disappointing and not suitable for distillation. Hybridization was attempted to create completely new vines which would combine the trait of being insect-resistant with the ability to grow well in French climatic conditions and produce decent wine. A noted botanist from the University of Bordeaux, Pierre-Marie-Alexis Millardet, declared:
It is a matter of nothing less than that of creating through crossing entirely new varieties, whose fruits will have the taste qualities of our indigenous varieties, to which will be joined at the same time the roots with the resistance proper to American vines. Evidently, this will be the solution par excellence to the phylloxera problem.
The attempts to create such new phylloxera-free direct producer by crossbreeding have met with limited success, though, so viticulturists had to turn their attention to grafting, i.e. transplanting time-tried French varieties atop American plants. The idea was simple: American rootstock would be able to withstand pest attacks while the upper section of the vine coming from European Vitis vinifera would produce grapes that everyone in France was accustomed to. Once suitable rootstocks have been identified, a campaign began to convince winegrowers to start replanting their vineyards with grafted vines.
Official commission visiting vineyards suspected of phylloxera, engraving in Le Journal illustré (September 28, 1878)
Initially, the grafting technique was fiercely resisted by vignerons, as it involved ripping out the old vineyards – which was hugely traumatic to them. There were also concerns that the wine from such compound vines would still have the “foxy” flavour of the American varieties that the roots came from. Besides, many were simply unwilling to accept that grafting on to American vines, which were the very cause of the catastrophe, could be a good solution in principle. But as there was no other choice, growers in most French regions eventually gave in (tax breaks and distribution of free rootstocks have helped this, too).
The problem, though, was that the grafts selected by scientists did not really suit the limestone subsoil of Charente. No American vines seemed to survive in the chalky alkaline soils of Cognac region, which kept the plants from absorbing the iron needed to produce chlorophyll. The resulting iron deficiency (called ‘chlorosis’) was especially acute in the vineyards of Grande and Petite Champagne – the very areas of the cognac country that provided the best and most sought after eaux-de-vie.
Grafting of the vine, educational poster from the era (after Victor Vermorel)
The by-now desperate Cognac community decided in 1887 to send someone to America to look for healthy vines that were growing in limestone terrain similar to the Charente River valley. They chose Pierre Viala, a professor of viticulture at Montpellier, who after six months of travelling around the US met Thomas Volney Munson – horticulturist and an expert in indigenous American grape species. Munson helped Viala to identify the fitting variety called Vitis berlandieri, which was native to central Texas where the soils are very similar to Charente’s.
In 1887, Viala brought this chlorosis-free plant back to France, but the grafts proved difficult to take from it. Only by crossing berlandieri with European species, chasselas (the work that was eventually done by Millardet), a hybrid rootstock both phylloxera-resistant and reproducible by cuttings has been obtained that allowed to start replanting the Champagnes of the Charente.
It then took more time to refine the grafting techniques, establish nurseries from which the growers could buy grafts, and teach them what to do with them. Once these vines were planted, another several years had to pass before they came into full production. All this, coupled with the delay linked to finding the right rootstock, meant that the recovery of the cognac category happened much later than the resurgence of French wines, for example. Grapes from the new plants finally started to be transformed into brandy only at the closing of the nineteenth century. In the meantime, there was a significant shortage of cognac on the market. This gap was quickly filled by industrially produced spirits, some of which were marketed under the name of ‘cognac’.
An advertisement for German ‘cognac’ Macholl (1916)
Many German distillers jumped on the opportunity and began selling their inferior products made from grain, potatoes, and beetroot as French brandy. There appeared a large number of ‘fake’ cognac traders: firms which got a postal address in Charente so that they could put a label on their bottles declaring it to be from there regardless of where it was produced.
‘Cognac in large quantities now enters England which comes out of potatoes and not out of grapes’ noted the Pall Mall Gazette in 1882. ‘Pure cognac can be secured only through English holders of old stocks’. Once the reserves accumulated by the London merchants during the 1860s were depleted, discerning British drinkers had to seek for a quality brandy substitute – which was found in Irish pot still whiskey and blended Scotch, the rise of which in the end of the nineteenth century was a direct result of the phylloxera epidemic.
In Imperial Russia, which has always been an important market, several vodka magnates have established their own production of ‘коньякъ’ (‘cognac’ in Cyrillic). Same thing was happening in Spain, where ‘coñac’ became a generic name for all brandies, including domestically produced ones. Although both Spanish and Russian brandies were made from grapes and often used production methods similar to the ones employed by the Charentais, they too were mimicking the French original – in terms of appearance and labelling – to a degree of confusion, thereby also committing nothing short but a fraud.
Spanish advertising poster for Cognac Quevedo V.O (1920s)
Faced with the intense competition from fakes (and with the rising popularity of other spirits such as Scotch and Irish whiskies), the cognac industry realized that to regain its consumers it had to protect its denomination. By the early twentieth century, French government introduced a law against falsely portraying a commodity as the product of a particular area to increase its value. In 1909, a special decree defined for the first time the delimited region within which it was allowed to produce a distinctive eau-de-vie called ‘cognac’. This was the beginning of the appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC) system that we know today.
During this transformational period, cognac industry also saw significant improvements in terms of productivity and quality control. The new vines were now planted in strict rows on wires, the method familiar to us today but not very common previously. It allowed winegrowers to use modern plows to work the soil between the rows and facilitated the application of chemicals to fight all sorts of diseases. Most cognac producers also shifted away from folle blanche grape variety to ugni blanc that dominates the Charente vineyards today – the latter being more fertile and vigorous, as well as having higher acidity (which is good for distillation).
It was at this time that large cognac houses started building their own distilleries to make eaux-de-vie themselves, which they hadn’t done before – in the old days they have depended on small independent producers, the so-called bouilleurs de cru, most of whom had disappeared during phylloxera. Last but not least, everyone began shipping cognac in bottles rather than in barrels, which had profound effect on its marketing and consumption patterns.
Overall, the phylloxera crisis was a disaster from which the cognac category has never fully recovered. It took until 1970 for cognac sales to reach their pre-phylloxera peak, while its vineyard is still less than a third of what it had been before the blight. When exports (notably to Britain) fell almost to nothing during the last quarter on the nineteenth century, it cleared the way for other spirits such as cheaper and heavily publicized blended Scotch to eventually usurp this and other lucrative markets, forever depriving cognac of its former glory and extent.
Alexandr Gorokhovskiy
©2024
Bibliography and further reading:
Gilles Bernard, Le cognac: à la conquête du monde (Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2011).
Jean Vincent Coussié, Le cognac et les aléas de l'histoire, 2e deuxième édition revue et corrigée (BNIC, 1996).
Jean-Robert Pitte, L'art du cognac (Paris: Éditions France Livres & Medias, 2012).
Nicholas Faith, Cognac: The Story of the World's Greatest Brandy (Oxford: The Infinite Ideas, 2016).
Roger Pouget, Histoire de la lutte contre le phylloxéra de la vigne en France (Paris, INRA: 1990).
George Gale, Dying on the Vine: How Phylloxera Transformed Wine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
Gilber Garrier, Le phylloxéra: une guerre de trente ans, 1870-1900 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989).
Kyle Jarrard, Cognac: The Seductive Saga of the World's Most Coveted Spirit (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2005).
Henri Pissot, Nos vignes. Souvenirs et actualités (Saintes, 1882).
Sherrie S. McLeroy and Roy E. Renfro, Jr., Grape Man of Texas: The Life of T. V. Munson (Austin: Eakin Press, 2004).
Jean-Augustin Barral, La Lutte contre le phylloxéra (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1883).
Bruno Sepulchre, Le livre du cognac: trois siècles d'histoire (Paris: Hubschmid & Bouret, 1983).