Catalan winemaking tradition II

Phylloxera modernizes viticulture

But in order to understand the current Catalan wine scene, we have to take a leap and locate ourselves second half of the 19th century with the appearance in Europe of three vine diseases imported from America, mildew, powdery mildew and phylloxera. Although the latter is the most serious, it was the powdery mildew crisis the one that imported American strains resistant to this disease created by fungi. These vines harbored the most global and devastating plague in the history of the vine, phylloxera, in the form of a small insect that lives exclusively by feeding on plants of the vitis genus. The American strains, due to continued proximity, have developed mechanisms that make them resistant to the attack, even though they can be carriers. So, before scientists found the solution, since the first appearance of the powdery mildew in France and the phylloxera in 1862, this tiny insect, at an incredible speed of about twenty-five kilometers per year, swept away all the French vineyards. This created a massive demand for wines in the rest of the producing areas and a large increase in prices. Plantations multiplied and the vineyard surface reached 40% of the entire State, while the ports of Valencia, Catalonia, and Mallorca channeled 80% of exports. 

But this moment of maximum extension of viticulture was cut short when, despite the hopes that the Pyrenees could act as a natural barrier to the plague, in In Catalonia, the first strains infected with phylloxera were detected in Rabós d'Empordà in 1879. In 1893 the disease had already invaded the Penedès, destroying all the vineyards there.

As the vineyard plantations had greatly expanded in Catalonia, which became the main agricultural activity, the arrival of the phylloxera that swept away all the vines, was a great economic and social catastrophe that caused that many people had to leave the countryside and go to the cities, attracted by the jobs created there by the Industrial Revolution.

That crisis marked with two events what was to be the future of the Catalan wine sector. On the one hand, when the phylloxera had not yet reached the Iberian Peninsula, some French winemakers and merchants settled in La Rioja, specifically a Haro, because there was a train station that communicated with the port of Bilbao and allowed them to export the wine easily to France. This brought the Bordeaux methods of making quality wine with aging to Rioja, which thus gained prestige and achieved what still happens to some extent today: that Rioja wine is synonymous with quality.

On the other hand, since the phylloxera uprooted all the vines, which had to be replanted, in a large part of wine-growing Catalonia and especially in the Penedès, the production of cava - champagne, it was said at the time that it had begun to be made a year earlier, when Luis Justo y Villanueva, of the Catalan Agricultural Institute of Sant Isidre, promoted the production of a native sparkling wine using the champagne method from the agricultural meeting of 1862, a task that was continued in 1872 by Josep Raventós y Fatjó, of Can Codorníu.

This is the origin of the "cavitation" of the Penedès, and therefore, the replanting of the vines with the three most suitable autochthonous white varieties: Xarelò, Macabeo and Parellada, which make wines with characteristics that, combined, complement each other and that, in addition, mature one after the other and allow the harvest to be staggered and rationalized. This specialization caused the disappearance of a large part of the indigenous grape varieties, in a trend that continued for decades as the production of cava increased thanks to the internationalization of the product.