The Merry Drinker

Here is an idea for a parlour game. Each player must try to name the United States’ most unpleasant export. Chewing gum? Political correctness?  Agent Orange?  Nuclear bombs? With so many delights to choose from, hours of fun are guaranteed.

My own nominee would be the Phylloxera aphid. This vicious little American pest feeds on the roots of vines and quickly destroys them.  During the 1860s and 70s it ravaged Europe’s vineyards and almost wiped out the entire continent’s production.  The only vines that could resist its attentions were those native to North America.  But American grapes produced an inferior, nasty-smelling drink of no imaginable interest to wine lovers.  What was to be done?

The solution, it turned out, was to graft European vines onto American vinestocks, and that is what Europeans have been doing ever since.  There has been much debate about whether and how this practice has changed the character of wine, but the argument seems academic, as we no longer have any basis for a comparison.

True, one or two examples of nineteenth-century wine still exist, but few of us are likely to sample them, and even if we could, I am not sure how much we might reasonably infer from any wine so old.  As for modern comparisons, the only remaining part of Europe that makes wine from pre-phylloxera vines is, I believe, Cyprus.  Whatever one thinks of Cypriot wine, it can offer few clues as to the taste of an 1845 Pomerol or an 1870 Chambertin.  Those wines are gone, and we have no objective way of measuring our loss.

All the same, the pre-Phylloxera world is not entirely closed off to us. Apart from Cyprus, there are a number of wine-growing areas of the planet which, through latitude or altitude, have always been immune to the killer aphid. One is Chile.

The house of Undurraga was founded in 1885 by Don Francisco Undurraga Vicuna.  It claims to be the only Chilean house still to use pre-phylloxera vines, brought over from Europe by Don Francisco himself.  I am in no position to verify these claims, but am happy to accept them.  The more interesting question is whether the taste of Undurraga’s wines is in any way distinctive through being pre-phylloxera, and on this subject Undurraga is annoyingly silent.

Whatever the reason, it so happens that Undurraga Founder’s Reserve is distinctive, both in its nose (earth, woodsmoke) and its flavour (cinnamon and coffee, among other things).  Its minerality reminded me distantly of Lebanese wine, but I would not press this point.  What matters is that amid the sea of competent but indistinguishable wines in the $29 (£20) bracket, this wine is both enjoyable and memorable.  Whether or not this is due to the presence of a European rather than a North American vinestock, I leave you to decide.  Oh, and do enjoy the parlour game.