When Missouri Saved French Wine

 

The story of how a St. Louis botanist helped rescue the French wine industry is one of the great chapters of Missouri history. Now, 150 years later, the state’s wild grapevines could have an important role to play once again. 

 

In the 1870s, a tiny aphid-like insect called Phylloxera was destroying European vineyards root by root. The French government dispatched a scientist to St. Louis to consult with George Engelmann, the Missouri Botanical Garden's founding botanist and America's foremost authority on native grapevines. Engelmann arranged for hundreds of thousands of shoots and seeds of Vitis riparia, the wild Riverbank grape native to Missouri, to be collected and shipped to France, where they were used as rootstocks onto which European vines were grafted. Nearly every bottle of French wine produced since then grows on North American roots, and the rescue started with a wild grape from the Mississippi Valley. 

 

This spring, Allison Miller, PhD, Danforth Center principal investigator and vice president of research, and professor at Saint Louis University, traveled to Bordeaux, France to serve on a doctoral dissertation committee. What she found sent her home asking whether Missouri’s native grapevines might again have something to offer.  

 

The dissertation she reviewed centered on what researchers describe as the largest rootstock experiment in the world, involving 275 combinations of rootstock and vine. The experiment explores whether rootstocks can help grapevines withstand increasingly difficult growing conditions. Some help vines tolerate hotter soils, while others improve drought or salt tolerance. The rootstock isn’t just a platform. It’s an active participant in how a plant survives. 

 

"You do not replant grapevines," says Miller. "They are in the ground 15 to 40 years. They have to keep producing, no matter what weather comes." 

 

That's the challenge facing French viticulture today. Strict regulations limit which rootstocks growers can use, while changing growing conditions create new pressures on vineyards. Europe has just one native grapevine species. Missouri alone has eight, each evolved over thousands of years in response to exactly the kinds of climatic stress vineyards worldwide are now beginning to experience. 

 

Missouri’s native grapevines are part of the rich diversity of wild grapes found across North America. Just as these vines supplied resistance to phylloxera, they could offer traits that help future rootstocks withstand today’s growing challenges. 

 

But Miller’s work also reveals a challenge: some of that diversity is at risk. A new study published in Plants, People, Planet, coauthored by Miller, documents wild grapevine diversity across the Americas and identifies gaps in its conservation. Some species are threatened in their natural habitats and poorly represented in genebanks and botanical gardens. 

 

For Miller, the rootstock experiment in Bordeaux illustrates why those conservation gaps matter. Without efforts to conserve them, researchers and growers could lose the wild plants that carry useful traits before they fully understand how those traits might help vineyards adapt. 

 

“I went to serve on a dissertation defense,” Miller reflects, “but it sparked all kinds of global thoughts.” 

 

More than a century ago, Missouri helped supply the North American grapevines that rescued European vineyards from a devastating pest. Protecting wild grapevines today, including Missouri’s native species, preserves options growers may need for challenges ahead.