[Disclaimer: If there's the slightest chance that you'll be bored by me banging on (yet again) about either wine or history, please feel more than welcome to stop reading now.]
I've been a little shy of wines from Chile and Argentina lately, mainly because the last few samples I've had have been over-the-top for the oak taste that aging in barrels gives them. (To say that I could have had the effect from licking the inside of the barrels is not overstating the case by all that much. Seriously.)
But while browsing the shelf at Festival North tonight, I flipped to the back label of a Los Vascos bottle because the front label didn't say what kind of grapes had gone into the wine. After reading it, I still had no clue as to the grapes themselves, but I did find something equally interesting. To wit:
Los Vascos, one of Chile's oldest wine estate, is controlled by the Domaines Barons de Rothchild (Lafite), who began a comprehensive modernization and investment program in 1988. The 500-hectare vineyard is located in the Canetan valley of the Colchagua province, which offers a healthy microclimate for its ungrafted pre-phylloxera Bordeaux rootstock...
If the last sentence made you think, "ungrafted pre-whaaaaht?," hang with me for a second or twelve. This is where the history nerdiness kicks in. After a bit of botany, anyway. What we consider "classic" (a.k.a. European) wines are made from subspecies of vitis vinifera. (Yes, I know: It sounds like a spell straight out of "Harry Potter," but I'm not making this up.) North America boasts a different native species, vitis labrusca, whose most famous sub-species ("Concord") gives us the grape juice we know from breakfast. It also tries to eat my mother's clothesline every year, but that's another story...
Vinis labrusca doesn't do so well as wine--wine made from the Niagara subspecies is sometimes described as "musky," which probably accounts for the species' nick-name of "fox grapes." But it is undeniably hardy. Thus, unsurprisingly, someone in the middle 1800s apparently had the bright idea of bringing this tough vine from America to Europe, presumably for hybridizing.
Trouble was, they also brought with the vines a parasitic louse known as phylloxera vastatrix. Vitis labrusca had, over the millennia, developed resistance to the louse. But its distant vinifera cousins didn't, and the results were absolutely devastating. The wine industry was ravaged for at least 20 years, and some vinifera subspecies considered commercially unimportant became extinct as efforts were put into preserving the more prized varietals.
Labrusca's curse, however, became a blessing. Branches of vinifera vines that had survived the destruction were grafted onto hybridized labrusca rootstock, checking the effects of the parasite. Even in 2009--nearly a century and a half later--an estimated 85% of all wine grape vines throughout the world are vitis labrusca at their roots. (Talk about Yankee colonialism at its finest!)
But apparently this wasn't true of the grapes that found their way into that bottle. Shady marketing aside--the label clearly wants you to confuse the vintners with their much, much tonier kin in Bordeaux whose 2006 vintage will set you back somewhere around $700 a bottle--I thought that $12 was worth the price of admission (for two) to taste a bit of history.True, it could completely suck, but humoring the Inner History Nerd is something I rarely regret doing.
