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The good news is that Joan C. Martín has written another key study about Valencian wine. The bad news is that I’m due to make a speech at the launch at El Corte Inglés (Av. Francia) on Tuesday 14 June.
This latest work is not about today’s wines and winemakers, but about an agricultural catastrophe that devastated all of Europe’s winemaking regions for decades after its arrival in France in 1863. Phylloxera is a pest (a sort of louse) that destroys vines. It arrived from America and proceeded on its path of devastation.
In the Valencia region, the plague had a double effect. First, it did not arrive here until 1904, later than the rest of Europe. This meant that the late nineteenth century was boom time for the wine industry of the region, as the rest of Europe saw production decimated, the demand for – and price of – wine from Valencia rose spectacularly.
However, when phylloxera did arrive, the rest of Europe was recovering, having established that grafting vines onto phylloxera-resistant North American root stock was effective. The impact on Valencia was dramatic. The vines died as the market disappeared. To all intents and purposes, the long history of the Valencia region, from Alicante in the south to Castellón in the north, as a major wine producer was eliminated at a stroke. Vines were ripped out throughout the region and replaced with other agricultural commodities. Castellón’s centuries-old reputation as a wine centre, hardly remained as a memory until recently.
To add to the collapse, the boom before the crash had seen old winemaking traditions and good practice undermined by the chance of selling any old wine at premium prices. When the Valencia region began again to produce wine, its reputation for quality had vanished. It was now regarded as a source of bulk wine for export.
Joan C. Martín’s book blends personal family recollections of the day-to-day with contextual scholarly research. Joan is a Valencian through and through, and it is excellent that to his list of books in English, Spanish and Catalan can be added a magnum opus in his native Valencian (I say this because the Valencian Catalan in which he wrote the excellent “Els vins de l’Arc Mediterrani” had its Valencian usages replaced with Catalan idioms by the publisher). However, the subject matter is not only of regional interest. It is a remarkable regional take on a Continental agricultural cataclysm. Now I think about it, I’m honoured to be asked to give that speech. And there’ll be plenty of excellent Valencian wine at the launch.
