The venue, staging and costumes were provided by the Kyoto-based neo-Dadaist group Phylloxera (Beatrix Fife, Mamoru Katagiri, Michael Lazarin).
He was among the first to notice that the American grapes, Vitis labrusca were resistant to grape Phylloxera.
His parents were viticulturists ruined by Phylloxera, and were unable to fund their son's studies, so he moved to Paris in 1902 and entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts as an apprentice, where he studied under Gaston Redon.
The French Revolution did not help the vineyard, but it picked itself back up again quickly to reach its peak at the end of the 19th century with an area of 1,500 hectares, before being decimated by the Phylloxera aphid.
According to wine critic and author Kerin O'Keefe, thanks to tiny parcels of vineyards throughout Europe which were inexplicably unscathed, it is still possible to get a taste of wines as they were before the phylloxera devastation.
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Another vineyard untouched by the blight is the Lisini estate in Montalcino: a half-hectare vineyard of Sangiovese, with vines dating back to the mid-1800s, which inexplicably never succumbed to phylloxera.
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In the same department, where the canal irrigation system built by the Romans still partly persists to this day, winter flooding is also practiced where possible, for instance south of the city of Tarascon.
The residents produced wine on a large scale before the 19th-century "Phylloxera plague," after which grape cultivation was restricted and fell.
Phylloxera | phylloxera |
The agricultural sector suffered a deep depression that affected the raising of livestock and all the major crops, especially cultivation of Vitis vinifera, a grape used for the wine industry, which was devastated by a Phylloxera epidemic.
INRA maintains a collection of vines at Domaine de Vassal, in Marseillan near Sète, a site where phylloxera cannot survive.
During large parts of the years 1892 to 1897, he worked for a commission studying the grape pest phylloxera in Bessarabia and Crimea.
When, in 1867, the vineyards of France were devastated by phylloxera, it was a Sabletain, Francois Leydier, who invented the grafting machine which helped enormously in saving the wine industry in this region and throughout France.