promoted mass emigration to the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The Government’s response was also the source of great bitterness and laid the foundation seeds for an independence movement and civil war. From the 1850s, new threats emerged. The first was oidium, or powdery mildew, which eventually brought grape yields down in France by 80%, but the vines did not die. Prices for Bordeaux Burgundy and Champagne were at an all-time high. A cure was found in the form of pulverised sulphur sprays, what we know as Bordeaux mixture today. The unfolding agricultural disaster saw French merchants develop a wine industry in Rioja, Spain, whilst some English merchants also looked to Australia as a source. Some observers believed that Australian wine could eventually equal ‘wool, tallow, gold, and coal’ as export commodities. Some glamorous investments were made in the early 1860s, notably Chateau Tahbilk, which advertised for a million vine cuttings to be planted in Central Victoria. It was a time when land was freed up, and closer settlement was encouraged as the Australian population increased. The Auldana Vineyard Association, Tintara, the Murray Valley Vineyard Association and other ventures were also formed with great hopes for exports. The 1860 abolishment of the preferential duty of Cape wine, from South Africa, the fall in ocean shipping costs, and legislative changes in 1861, which created off-licences in Britain, encouraged entrepreneurs over the next 20 years to invest in wine production. Although Australia’s exports to Britain quadrupled over the 1860s, and doubled again by the mid-1870s, it was all off a small base, and the reality was much different. A combination of variable quality, trade barriers, and political manipulation hampered progress throughout this period. There was even a scientific scandal in which scientists Dr Johann Thudichum and Dr August Dupré claimed that Australian wine was all fortified, because it was allegedly impossible to achieve an alcohol level of 26° proof (14.86% alcohol) naturally. Thudichum declared ‘that nowhere was any wine made which naturally had above 26 degrees of proof spirit and very many had not anything like it’. But it was a scientific fraud that the British Government leveraged to slam higher duties on wine above 26° proof. The mother of all vine enemies arrived in France around 1862. A wine merchant at Roquemaure, in the French region of Gard, near Châteauneuf du Pape, received a case of vine cuttings from New York and planted them in his walled vineyard. A few years later, between 1864 and 1865, grapevines around the town withered and died. Over the following years, phylloxera swept through the vineyards of France and destroyed thousands and thousands of acres of vineyards, with some regions never truly recovering. Unlike oidium, phylloxera was an aphid-like creature that attacked the roots and killed the vines. Although the solution of grafting European vines onto American rootstocks was discovered in the early 1870s, the reconstruction of the French wine industry took decades and presented Australia with a massive opportunity. While observed in 1875, the official discovery of phylloxera at Fyansford near Geelong, Victoria, in 1877, was a massive setback. It arrived in Australia 23 years before
104 The Wine Journal – 2023
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