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Financial Times

Business

Andrew Jefford

The new, deadly disease threatening the wine world

When the wealthy Pinault family’s Artemis group bought a Burgundy vineyard called Clos de Tart in October 2017, it was only the fourth change of ownership for this Grand Cru in 875 years. The 7.5ha vineyard was already planted when the first recorded transfer of ownership took place in 1141: vines then, vines now. Distinguished vineyards are fiercely monocultural, planted for centuries with one plant species alone (Vitis vinifera). This carries risks. When problems bite, they bite hard.

The horticultural globalism of the 19th century posed three near-fatal challenges to wine production: the arrival of two fungal diseases — downy and powdery mildew — and then, most catastrophically, the vine insect pest commonly known as phylloxera. As a consequence, vines in most global locations today are a grafted union of two separate species: vinifera above ground, and a phylloxera-resistant vine species below. It is slowly dawning on the wine world that it faces a new disease problem, one that those most seriously affected don’t hesitate to call “the next phylloxera”: grapevine trunk disease (GTD).

This time, there is no insect villain, nor even a single set of symptoms. Four separate fatal vine diseases are clustered together under the GTD heading: esca, eutypa, botryosphaeria and cylindrocarpon. They involve a small army of fungal pathogens. Esca (known to the Romans) kills suddenly — the French call it “the heart attack of the vines”. Eutypa or “dead arm” is debilitating but not immediately fatal; one Australian wine grower, Chester Osborn of d’Arenberg, names a wine after the disease, claiming that the lower yields in affected vineyards mean that “the grapes display amazing intensity”. The other two are asymptomatic until too late: they destroy from within. Diagnosis requires cutting into the vine wood.

“It’s not as dramatic as phylloxera,” says global viticultural consultant Richard Smart. “It’s well described by the word ‘insidious’. Like some cancers.” For Smart, though, there are villains. Complacent viticulturalists are one; the other is the specialist nursery trade. “Grapevine trunk disease,” he told me recently, “is spread fundamentally by nurserymen. When you plant a vineyard, you are almost invariably planting infected vines.” David Amblevert, president of France’s nurserymen’s federation, contests this, saying the problem is latent in vineyards rather than in new plant material. No one, though, underestimates its seriousness. The International Organisation of Vine and Wine suggests that up to 20 per cent of the world’s vineyards are now affected, implying that the years ahead will require a vast programme of replanting if production isn’t to fall significantly. Replanting means five years’ loss of production and colossal expense.

For wine drinkers, there are two practical consequences: rising prices and a general loss of quality as fewer vines survive to maturity, still less to the old age with which the highest wine quality is often associated. Some varieties (or cultivars) are more vulnerable to GTD than others. If you enjoy Sauvignon Blanc with your fish, Cabernet Sauvignon with your beef and a brandy distilled from Ugni Blanc (as Cognac is) afterwards, you are in the front line: these are the worst affected varieties. Chenin Blanc, Grenache and Syrah are also notably susceptible. No variety, though, is immune.

The best solution, vineyard replanting, is the most expensive and the most time-consuming. Other solutions include regrafting, trunk renewal (growing a new trunk from a low shoot) and remedial surgery: all are laborious, but at least you don’t lose total production for five years. Strict hygiene when pruning, especially the protection of pruning wounds, is vital — yet far from standard practice. All this work is in vain unless nurseries can guarantee clean plant material.

“There will be an existential crisis in California,” warns John Dyson, owner of leading Russian River Pinot Noir winery Williams Selyem, who is having to replant a valuable Pinot vineyard for the second time in a decade after having been sold infected plants, and who can find no leading California nursery prepared to guarantee GTD-free vines for an upcoming Sauvignon Blanc project at another of his vineyards. “A lot of replanting in the 1980s was hastily done, and now needs redoing. If growers replant with infected material, they are in for a shock. To me it’s mind-boggling — an outrage.” He has longer-term worries too. “The big issue is that the fine wine world depends on a small number of distinguished sites, which are replanted over and over again. With other crops, if you have a problem, you can go off and find another field. That doesn’t work for fine wines. We can’t do crop rotation, either, as the vine’s cycle is long and the best wine comes from older vines. So if high-quality viticultural land becomes infected, there will always be danger for new plantings and for replanting. That’s the real challenge.”

The solution is one the wine world would rather not hear: breeding for disease resistance. “Classic wine grape cultivars . . . have spread throughout the globe,” plant scientist Tim Martinson recently pointed out in Wines & Vines magazine, “but their genetics are frozen in the Middle Ages. This is in stark contrast to other horticultural and agronomic crops. What if fruit breeding had stopped in the 1600s? Peaches would be the size of cherries, watermelons would have six small pockets of red flesh divided by fleshy white tissue, and bananas would have large seeds. Are traditional wine grape varieties — wonderful as they are — impervious to improvement?” Fine wine grapes are such a valuable crop, and the wine they produce is subject to such intense scrutiny, that the wariness of wine growers towards “new varieties” is understandable. Many researchers, though, believe that breeding disease-resistant clones, cultivars and rootstocks is the only long-term means of controlling GTD — and indeed controlling other diseases, as well as being the key to using fewer chemicals in vineyards. Should producers, nurseries and legislators therefore embrace new varieties? This is the wine quandary of our times.

Recommended fine wines and spirits made from varieties susceptible to GTD

Sauvignon Blanc
Churton Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough, New Zealand 2016
£15.50 Tanners
Chenin Blanc
Vouvray, Le Haut-Lieu Sec, Domaine Huet, Loire Valley, France 2016
£26.60 Armit
Cabernet Sauvignon
Torres Mas la Plana Penedès, Spain 2012
£39 Waitrose Cellar
Grenache
Daniel Landi, Las Uvas de la Ira, Gredos, Spain 2015
£22.99 AG Wines
Syrah
Crozes-Hermitage, Les Entrecoeurs Domaine Mucyn 2016
£15.95 Tanners
Ugni Blanc
Delamain Pale & Dry Cognac, France
£100 Berry Bros & Rudd