The arrival of phylloxera took place in La Rioja 125 years ago and destroyed its wine

But it was not enough to watch how the world was destroyed to make decisions. From the first day of this ‘pandemic’, La Rioja blamed the Ministry for inaction. All the measures that had been designed to prevent the plague, all the money raised, the planned plans… could not be carried out due to legislative inaction. And the consequences, as was predictable, were devastating and devastating.

Months after the Sajazarra outbreak, the plague had already developed in hundreds of hectares of San Asensio, San Vicente, Anguciana, Ábalos, Nájera, Briones, Cuzcurrita… But also Alfaro and Aldeanueva. In 1901 the situation was desperate and the affected municipalities reached forty.

The until then fertile vineyards, which had grown excessively to fill the French wineries, attacked twenty years earlier by phylloxera, now looked like cemeteries of dead and sinister vines.

The cause of the havoc was a millimeter insect that had arrived in Europe, via London, from the United States. It devoured the leaves, penetrated the soil and sucked the roots to feed, weakening the plant until it killed it or left it so weak that it died from any other infection.

Its devastating expansion was well known. Since 1875 it was planted with French vineyards and a few years later it appeared in Malaga, beginning a slow but inexorable advance that in 1896 was already being felt in neighboring Navarra.

The unloading of plants from phylloxerated provinces in La Rioja was prohibited, the plantations were monitored, important informative and preventive work was carried out… José Bellido even designed the so-called ‘Logroño Plan’ in 1883, which involved creating a barrier of 30 kilometers of width free of vineyard to preserve the wine-growing heart of the Ebro and Duero. But neither the training nor the utopias helped.

Phylloxera arrived in La Rioja and in a very short period of five years it had already devastated more than 35,000 hectares, almost two thirds of an area that had multiplied crazily since phylloxera appeared in France (in less than 20 years more than 20,000 hectares). The price of wine multiplied, intermediaries and investors appeared… but in that first ‘golden age’ of Rioja, crops were not modernized or French production methods were generalized, except in very specific cases.

So when France began to recover its vineyards, tariffs were increased since 1892 and sales plummeted, a plague appeared that was an insurmountable punishment for the region.

Crisis and mistrust

The unleashed crisis shook the foundations of a key sector. And, as always happens in moments of extreme depression, it was the lower strata of society that suffered the most: farmworkers, small winegrowers… they lost their livelihood. The decomposition was so incredible that the only scientifically supported solutions (and the most expensive), such as grafting on American vine roots, were rejected. Violent demonstrations were even called and those grafts were even stolen and burned. The historian Andreas Oestreicher goes so far as to describe this rejection as a “class conflict”, since the only possible solution for viticulture was only viable for the wealthiest.

But in 1903, after the resounding failure of the ‘antiphylloxeric Varela’ (a curious mixture of lime, urine, strong tobacco and copper sulfate ‘invented’ by a Galician who managed to deceive winegrowers and Riojan people), a true replanting began. Little by little the new vines were uprooted and planted. Slowly until in 1910 Francisco Martínez-Zaporta, president of the Provincial Council, launched the idea of ​​a Provincial Wine Fund that added membership and, starting in 1911, served as a great promoter of repopulation and grafting, especially for the most modest winegrowers. who could access the grafts in installments.

By 1912, more than 10,540 hectares had already been reconstituted thanks to a market that continued to grow. The nurseries were advertised in the pages of the newspaper by the dozens, almost with the same intensity and variety as the merchant companies that offered trips to South America.

Because phylloxera devastated the vineyards for almost three decades, but the demographic bite was felt for much longer. What’s more, both crises, the wine crisis and the social crisis, coexisted for years. Phylloxera exploded but also ended up drying up the economic and labor demands of the agricultural workforce. If strikes and mobilizations multiplied until 1905, they ended up taking a backseat at the time when the anguish involved putting bread on the table.

And the lack of prospects was felt in the towns, which were depleted of young and not so young people who listened to the siren songs and the promises (on too many occasions interested or false) to escape poverty.

Gallego Martínez estimates that 32,000 Riojans left their land between 1888 and 1920. In the hardest times, between 1901 and 1910, the negative balance exceeded 20,900 people. But, curiously, the population of the capital and of towns with industrial appeal, such as Calahorra or Cervera del Río Alhama, grew.

The 1920s put an end to the phylloxera crisis. Although only 23,555 hectares of vineyards had been recovered (less than half that at the end of the 19th century), according to Jesús Provedo, another of the great researchers on phylloxera in La Rioja, the sector was once again exhibiting muscle and was organized. . This rebound, based on new production and aging methods, giving life to a Rioja that was recognizable in essence but completely different from that before the crisis, led to the creation in June 1925 of the Rioja Designation of Origin.