Wine: Even today, some 140 years after it first began to ravage French vineyards, phylloxera is spoken of with dread by winemakers all over the world.
It is to vines what cancer is to humans - a scourge which remains potentially fatal despite the scientific advances which have helped to keep it at bay. It still comes as a surprise to find a whole, fat, hardback for the general reader devoted to the history and habits of a microscopic vine louse.
Christy Campbell, a former defence correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, charts the relentless advance of the invasion which brought the French wine industry to its knees in the late 1800s with whatever pace and colour he can muster through a documentary approach. Leading scientists of the day, notably Jules-Emile Planchon, a botanist from Montpellier, and Charles V. Riley, State Entomologist for Missouri, are cast in the role of agents determined to exterminate an enemy found on both sides of the Atlantic. Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur play cameo parts. Even so, there is often the feeling that the tiny yellow aphid is winning - draining the text of momentum as it slowly sucks the life out of a million hectares of French vineyard.
There are fascinating elements in the story, nonetheless. It was the Victorian passion for botany, and the transfer of plant cuttings among enthusiasts in different countries, that brought phylloxera to Europe from America in the first place, then accelerated its advance. Interestingly, around the time that its deadly effects were first observed in the Southern Rhone in 1863, a famous Oxford entomologist, Professor J. O. Westwood, received a packet of blistered vine leaves from a greenhouse in Hammersmith. A few years later, a similar package reached him from Powerscourt House in Co Wicklow, where the grapevines were failing. The culprit was the same creature. Phylloxera exists in root-living, leaf-living and winged forms.
As the plague moved through France, affecting one region after another, the initial reaction was usually denial, or a laissez-faire shrugging of bureaucrat shoulders, followed by frenetic activity on the part of stricken vignerons. Some attempted unusual "remedies" - toads were buried at strategic intervals; a mixture of whale oil and petrol was applied; volcanic ash from Pompeii was acquired; and human urine (male version only) was believed to have such beneficial properties that schoolboys in Beaujolais were taken out twice a day to urinate in dwindling vineyards.
It was noticed that sandy soil stopped the aphid in its tracks. Flooding vineyards with water and drowning it also proved effective, if limited: it was possible only on flat land with a plentiful water supply. A broader approach was required.
In time the war against phylloxera was fought on two fronts. There were those who believed in chemical weapons. Truckloads of carbon bisulphide were injected into the ground by producers who could afford such treatments. It is no surprise to read that grand Bordeaux chateaux like Mouton and Latour were among the most committed sulfuristes.
Attacking from another direction were the Américainistes - those who believed that, with their natural resistance to phylloxera, American vines held the key to victory. The main problem was that the wines they produced tasted distinctly dodgy, with a curious foxy flavour - or so it was claimed by many whose palates were used to French grapes. A viticultural curiosity displayed at a major congress in Montpellier in 1874 was to provide the solution. It was Aramon - a French grape variety - grafted on to American rootstock.
Proponents of the technique explained that both parts of the new plant would retain their identity, so there would be no risk of the dreaded foxy whiff from its grapes. Grafting caught on rapidly: over 900 vignerons signed on for a course in Montpellier in 1879. Although some mistakes were made with the American varieties selected and the locations chosen for them, grafting was to save the French wine industry from ruin - and to slow the advance of phylloxera in other countries already suffering from it by the 1870s, including Portugal, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Italy, Austria and Hungary.
There is, of course, a fascinating postscript to the saga, and it is a pity that Campbell does not allow it more space. Phylloxera has marched through California since the early 1980s, devastating thousands of hectares planted with the supposedly resistant and much vaunted rootstock, AXR1. The lousy louse appears to have mutated, breaking through the vine's defences.
By 1997, the search for a genetically-engineered fix was under way, with the introduction of a gene from the snowdrop into vine rootstocks. Richard Smart, the world's most sought-after viticultural guru, has dismissed the GM approach for scientific reasons; but the objection to it on cultural grounds has proved more powerful, with the establishment of the Terre et Vin du Monde movement championing wine purity and the authenticity of terroir. In 2003, hundreds of producers in half a dozen countries signed up to a 10-year moratorium on research into transgenic vines and yeasts. But with such research continuing in Europe, the US, Chile, Israel and Australia, some industry experts feel GM wine is just around the corner.
If they are right, the looming battle between genetic engineers and terroiristes may be more spellbinding than the 19th-century struggle which Christy Campbell has chosen to describe in such exhaustive detail.
Mary Dowey is the Wine Correspondent of The Irish Times.