When the spare thought allows, I often wonder how the vinous landscape of Europe would look today were it not for the scourge of Phylloxera in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. The root louse came at the exact time in which wine production was shifting from a small, familiar affair of bottles drank within the village to that of wines which were sent far and wide and produced on a much larger scale. Once Phylloxera had killed off vine after vine and then imported mildews arrived with another […]

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