When Missouri Saved French Wine

The story of how a St. Louis botanist rescued the French wine industry is one of the great chapters of Missouri history—and it may be about to repeat itself. 

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. 

Now, 150 years later, a Danforth Center scientist has returned from Bordeaux asking whether Missouri might again have something to offer. 

This spring, Allison Miller, PhD, Danforth Center principal investigator and vice president of research, and professor at Saint Louis University, traveled to France to serve on a doctoral dissertation committee. What she found sent her home thinking about Missouri grapevines differently. The research centered on what its scientists describe as the largest rootstock experiment in the world—275 combinations of rootstock and vine—and a key question: can rootstocks help confer resilience, improving the ability of a long-lived plant to adapt to changing conditions? Some help vines withstand hotter soils. 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. France's strict regulations on approved rootstocks, most dating to the 1800s, limit what its researchers can explore. There is one native grapevine species in all of Europe. Eight grow in Missouri alone, evolved over thousands of years in response to exactly the kinds of climatic stress vineyards worldwide are now beginning to experience. 

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