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Had he not told her of his simple upbringing in El Kreir, a remote village of Tunisia, by a mother who had been left in poverty after the death of his father, a Russian who had come to Africa to make a fortune by vine-growing, and who had had his hopes blasted by three years of drought and by the visitation of the dreaded phylloxera?
The Hermitage, from the hill-sides directly across the river from Tournon, around the town of Tain, scarcely lives up to its heroic tradition just now the phylloxera having destroyed the old vines, planted by the hermit of blessed memory, and the new vines having in them still the intemperate strength of youth. Yet is it a sound rich wine, in a fair way to catch up again with its ancient fame.
Even amidst the jutting crags the adventurous vine lifted its sunny leaves; but, alas! here, too, the phylloxera had begun its work of desolation, and I had little doubt that these hills laden with fruit were destined in a few years to become a waste of stones like so many others that I had seen nearer the plains which had once streamed with wine.
Passing Tournon and Tain, we soon come in sight of the famous little village of the Hermitage, a sunburnt, granitic slope, its three hundred acres once being a mine of gold. Formerly a hectare of this precious vineyard was worth 30,000 francs. The phylloxera, alas! has invaded it.
Before the vines a little further down the valley were destroyed by the phylloxera and mildew, the people were much better off. Then there was plenty of wine in the cellars, but now St. Bazile was a village of water-drinkers. He spoke of the neighbouring parish of Servieres, where, at the annual pilgrimage, women go barefoot from one rock to the other on which the chapel stands.
In California, grapes of the vinifera or European species are generally cultivated; but the phylloxera is at its destructive work among them. The wine-grapes of the future throughout the world may be developed from the hardy cestivalis and cordifolia classes. In many localities, even in this new land, varieties like the Delaware succumb to this scourge of foreign vineyards.
The phylloxera which has spoilt the French vineyards is a root-feeding form that attacks the vine, and kills or maims the plant terribly, by sucking the vital juices on their way up into the fresh-forming foliage.
Then came the Phylloxera, the vine-stocks perished and the once green table-land is now no more than a desolate stretch where a few tufts of hardy grasses sprout among the pebbles. This waste-land is the Lycosa's paradise: in an hour's time, if need were, I should discover a hundred burrows within a limited range.
I now drank the fragrant light wine of the Gévaudan the calcareous district of the Upper Tarn with a pleasure not unmixed with sorrow; for the phylloxera had found its way up the gorge, and the vineyards were already sick unto death.
In South France the ravages of the phylloxera have called into existence a great number of wine-growers' associations. Ten to thirty growers form a syndicate, buy a steam-engine for pumping water, and make the necessary arrangements for inundating their vineyards in turn.
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