Once upon a vineyard, vines lived dangerously – rooted in their own skin, unbothered by the subterranean saboteur that would bring Europe’s wine world to its knees. Phylloxera vastatrix, a microscopic aphid native to North America, was the villain. Its very name is a warning: vastatrix is Latin for “the devastator”, a title bestowed by 19th-century scientists who watched, helpless, as this speck of a thing laid waste to the vineyards of Europe. 

As the Age of Steam shrank oceans and expanded ambitions, botanists and collectors sent American vine cuttings to Europe, with phylloxera hidden in the dirt – a stowaway clinging to the roots. Its arrival in France around 1863 was a catastrophe. Its effects first noticed near the Southern Rhône, it crept into the Languedoc, then Provence and Bordeaux by 1870, before beginning a slow, grim pilgrimage through Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Hungary and beyond. 

At first, the blight was a mystery. Vines withered, roots turned to lace, and the cause seemed spectral – an invisible terror in the terroir. Winemakers, proud but desperate, resorted to curious rituals: burying live toads beneath vines to draw out the “poison”; injecting carbon disulphide into the soil with great metal syringes, risking asphyxiation in the name of salvation. France’s government offered a reward in excess of 300,000 francs to anyone who could find a cure.  

Some growers blamed hygiene, others bad luck. Denial flourished, even as livelihoods perished. Suicides mounted – men overcome by the grief of losing not just crops but legacy. Church bells tolled as phylloxera advanced. A way of life bled out through the roots. Thousands abandoned their land, convinced French wine was fini. 

With Bordeaux’s cellars running dry, desperate eyes turned southwest to Rioja, still untouched. French négociants and oenologists poured in, bringing not only their thirst but technique: smaller fermentation tanks, the meticulous removal of stems and barrel-ageing in 225-litre barriques. Rioja – once rustic, often rough – became structured, cellar-worthy and suddenly exportable. Haro’s railways carried these polished reds north, and bodegas like CVNE took root. 

One wine in particular emerged as emblem: Imperial Rioja, named for its “imperial pint” bottling – a half-litre format made for the British market. The French even trialled cabernet and malbec in Rioja, but it was their winemaking methods – especially barrique-ageing – that transformed the region. Tempranillo rose to dominance. Rioja’s reputation soared. This golden age endured until 1899, when phylloxera finally reached its vines. Despite frantic measures, the louse could not be stopped. But the French legacy remained – giving Rioja a technical fluency that winemaker, Miguel Ángel de Gregorio once described as ‘a Burgundy-style wine with a Bordeaux history’. 

Meanwhile, in the green-glass vacuum left by Bordeaux and Burgundy, absinthe slithered into vogue. At “l’heure verte”, the green hour, Parisian poets and painters let it bloom on the tongue and in the mind. Absinthe was not merely a substitute – it was muse and medium, a bitter balm in a world losing its flavour. 

The solution lay in the very roots that had carried the plague. In the late 1870s, two French growers – Leo Laliman and Gaston Bazille – proposed an audacious fix: grafting European vines onto resistant American rootstocks. The technique – known as “reconstitution” – was controversial, begrudgingly accepted and ultimately correct. Laliman later claimed the government’s reward but was denied it on the grounds that grafting did not cure the disease, only circumvented it, while rumours teemed that he had actually caused the crisis to begin with. Slowly, painfully, the vineyards of Europe were reborn – this time on foreign feet. 

The craft of no graft 

Advocates of ungrafted vines speak of wines with more precision, intensity and a clearer voice – terroir without translation. The grapes are often smaller, the flavours more concentrated. German winemaking legend Egon Müller insists the difference is ‘clearly distinguishable’ in the glass – ungrafted wines, he says, show more harmony, more complexity. 

Sceptics disagree. They argue that site, vine age and farming trump rootstock. A well-grafted vine, properly treated, can sing just as beautifully. Still, the romance of the ungrafted vine – one continuous being, unmediated and unspliced – endures. It may be mostly myth. But myths, like vines, survive because people feed them. 

This is not only a story of viticulture. It is a parable of resilience. Of destruction and reinvention. Of landscapes altered, economies shaken, cultures forced to dig elsewhere. Phylloxera did not only make new wines – it made new rituals. Absinthe became a kind of sacrament. Rioja found a new self. Innovation, grief, rebellion – all resolving in the casks left behind. 

In a few far-flung places – volcanic, sandy or dry enough to repel the pest – the louse never found purchase. Here, own-rooted vines still whisper of a prelapsarian past. Their wines taste not only of place, but of memory. They are not always generous, but they are precise. Wines that feel like they have survived something. Here is a selection worth exploring, all available from strictlywine.co.uk. 

Vijariego blanco, Bodegas Viñátigo (£28.15) 

Razor-sharp, grown on black volcanic grit where nothing much else dares to. Juan Jesús Méndez, the mind behind Bodegas Viñátigo, has built his life around reviving Tenerife’s vanishing grapes. Vijariego blanco, once on the brink of extinction, has been coaxed into something bracingly pure. The vines grow high on the northern slopes, blasted by Atlantic winds, sun-struck and dry-farmed in soils resembling cooled lava. 

Negramoll, Bodegas Viñátigo (£31.11) 

Pale and earthy, with a whiff of dried leaves and red fruit just verging on ripeness. In lesser hands it might seem wan, but Méndez treats it as you would a temperamental genius. The vines are often a century old, their arms braided along trellises in the ancient cordón trenzado style, like living ropes. Picked early, semi-carbonically fermented and aged gently (sometimes in used barrels, sometimes in tanks), this is a wine suspended in mid-air. 

Clay assyrtiko, Gaia Wines (£32.56) 

Assyrtiko is the grape that drinks salt. On Santorini’s moonscape of volcanic rubble, where rain barely falls and roots must bore metres deep to find moisture, it has evolved into something taut and elemental. Gaia’s Clay cuvée is born in amphorae buried beneath the ground, where temperature stays cool and fermentation happens slowly. You taste citrus oil, thyme, scorched earth, sea air, but more than that, you taste absence: of intervention, of excess and of compromise. The vines, often 100 years old, are trained into low, wreath-like baskets (kouloura) to protect them from the Aegean winds. 

Altazor cabernet sauvignon blend, Undurraga (£53.50) 

Up in the Maipo Alto, where the Andes lean in close and the wind carries the scent of stone and scrub, phylloxera never came. Here, Rafael Urrejola of Undurraga coaxes a cabernet blend from alluvial soils veined with clay, fermenting with native yeasts and ageing in French oak as though translating the place into another tongue. The result is dark and deliberate – cassis, graphite and cracked pepper stitched with a high-altitude lift that feels like a lungful of mountain air at dusk.