Word: phylloxeras
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...Napa and Sonoma counties, heartland of California's $730 million-a-year wine industry, prospects are promising for a bumper harvest this fall. Beneath the deceptively lush surface of the peaceful vineyards, however, an expensive disaster looms. Billions of microscopic parasites called phylloxeras are munching away at the roots of the grape-bearing stalks. While no threat to human health, within a decade the tiny insects could eat their way through 50,000 acres of the nation's finest vineyards. Estimates of the total damage, including the cost of replanting with Phylloxera-resistant stalks, range from $500 million to more...
...University of California has set up a Phylloxera Task Force, but no chemical treatment has proved effective against this new biotype, and experts cannot rule out further mutations. In fact, another strain of the louse has been found in central California and as far south as Santa Barbara. For farmers the safest solution is to rip out their AXR 1 and replant with one of a dozen or so other rootstalks that appear to be more resistant to the mutations, at least so far. After replanting, it takes three years for a vine to produce mature, harvestable grapes...
...retail price of a standard (750- ml) bottle of wine. Pessimists in the industry predict that the increase could reduce wine consumption by 12% and lead to the loss of 7,000 jobs. The tax hike comes at a time when many growers are also worried about phylloxera, a mite-size plant louse that is gnawing away at vines, primarily in Napa and Sonoma counties. An estimated 250 acres have been affected so far, and replanting with new phylloxera-resistant vines may cost upwards of $250 million in Napa Valley alone...
...acre, compared with as much as $400,000 in France's Bordeaux region. The country has a host of grape-hospitable regions whose weather remains remarkably stable from year to year. Chilean grapevines, of mostly transplanted French and some German stock, are unscathed by the Phylloxera that devastated Californian and European vines in the 19th century. With an annual output of some 70 million gal., Chile ranks 13th among the world's wine producers. Los Vascos, with a yearly capacity of 423,000 gal., is unusual among the country's vineyards in that most of its wines are exported...
...nation, Franciscan Padre Junipero Serra, founder of nine Spanish missions in California, was making wine in San Diego. After the Gold Rush in 1849, a Hungarian adventurer named Agoston Haraszthy brought 200,000 premium European grapevines to California. In the 1880s an epidemic of the root disease, phylloxera, wiped out nearly all of Europe's vineyards. Thousands of American rootstocks, with their phylloxera-resistant native roots, were shipped over to Europe. Thus most European wine is made from transplanted U.S. vines, and most California wine is made from vines that originated in Europe-a kinship that Californians never tire...