4 March 2004
Curse of the drinking classes...
Last week French wine growers met prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin for 'crisis talks', a result of falling consumption at home and strong competition from New World wines for exports. Small beer compared with the phylloxera crisis of the late 1850s. This North American aphid destroyed 40% of French vines and threatened every vine in Europe. That time New World vines were the saving of Europe's wine industry, the story retold in Phylloxera: How Wine was Saved for the World, reviewed this week.
Rooting out the wine plague
JEFFREY GRANETT
Nature 428, 20 (2004); doi:10.1038/428020a
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