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Dying on the Vine: How Phylloxera Transformed Wine. By George Gale. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 336 pp., $39.95, hardback, ISBN 978-0-520-26548-6.
The history of phylloxera has been widely studied, not just because France's wine industry at one point in the nineteenth century appeared threatened with its total and permanent destruction, but also, because as recently as the 1980s, errors in rootstock selection required most of California's vines to be replanted. In this book, George Gale takes a strictly scientific approach to the subject, and shows how growers, research stations, universities, and governments around the world have responded to the deadly threat.
Phylloxera was first noticed in France's vineyards in the mid-1860s and, with the notable exception of Portugal, it was only in this country that destruction was massive before 1900. The scientific...