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Paper short abstract:

The Italian Alto Piemonte was once famous for Nebbiolo wines. Wine production over the last 150 years has been challenged by both industrial transformation and the impact of natural disaster. This long history has made contemporary winemakers particularly conscious of the impact of climate change.

Paper long abstract:

In a world of growing wine production, export, and noble grapes, what about those regions that have declined and almost disappeared? After a century and a half of natural disasters and industrial transformations, the wines of this sub-alpine area are hard to find. Through the experience of wine tasting in different vineyards, this paper examines the entwining of labor and environmental histories and argues that winemaking here is a constant negotiation with the presence of ruins. If in the popular imagination, ruins evoke crumbling classical temples, they also increasingly conjure industrial, even agricultural debris. As a growth-decay process, ‘to ruin’ focuses less on the productive elements of capitalism, but on its destructive.

In the Alto Piemonte, the detritus of fine wine, industrial rise and fall, and natural disaster is etched everywhere from the biology of the vine roots to the forest floor to the city streets. Over the course of the 19th century, phylloxera and devastating storms decimated wine growing and, in the aftermath, the wool, textile, and cashmere industry enticed growers with the promise of wage labor as opposed to fieldwork dependent on the vicissitudes of harvest and vintage. Using the theoretical concept of capitalist ruins, this paper reveals the way today’s winemaking in the Alto Piemonte is a cultural dialogue with the past about labor history and environmental change. This dialogue, in turn, shapes concerns about climate change.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the phylloxera crisis in France led to the extension of vine frontier in North Africa. It takes into consideration the increasing global circulation of entomological knowledge during the period, and the role this insect has in shaping Algerian and Tunisian winescapes.

Paper long abstract:

The introduction of phylloxera in Europe had a disruptive effect on the global wine market in the late 19th century, leading to an extension of the vine frontier in North Africa. The emergence of global entomology as a scientific field, international conferences and legislative models devised to establish a phytopathological order came out of the phylloxera crisis. In this paper, I will look at the circulation of entomological knowledge, moving from the international conferences to the ground, and its role in the transformation of the colonial vineyards in Algeria and Tunisia. Despite entomologists’ efforts to prevent the arrival of the aphid, showing control anxieties exacerbated in the colonial framework, phylloxera thwarted these attempts, and gradually invaded Algeria and Tunisia between the 1880s and the early 20th century. The networks of actors involved in fighting phylloxera produced strategies based on intensive surveillance of vineyards, controlled flows of plants and people likely to carry the insect, as well as systematic pest eradication with insecticides. This paper focuses on how new configurations of humans and nonhumans resulted in ecological simplifications and a paradoxical transition to winegrowing monoculture in the French Empire.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper studies fertilization as a mechanism to improve Cape colonial vineyards in the wake of phylloxera in the late 19th century. I focus on scientific exchanges occurring within and outside the boundaries of empire, and how the diffusion of such ideas posed harmful impacts at the local level.

Paper long abstract:

In January 1886, the vine disease phylloxera was spotted in a vineyard in the Western Cape. Although the insect had ravaged vineyards globally since the 1860s, its discovery in South Africa initiated greater attention into the ‘science’ within viticulture. Colonial committees made up of Afrikaners, British, and other Europeans were commissioned to survey vineyards, investigate best cultivation practices and ultimately, find a method of eradicating phylloxera. Here, the environmental crisis served as a moment to reconsider the ‘science’ of colonial winegrowing and implement 19th century ideas about agriculture. The use of fertilizer in vineyards was given newfound attention with phylloxera’s introduction, as it was believed that manuring vines would work well in combination with pesticides to limit or even prevent phylloxera’s devastation and conserve the empire’s vineyards. While bone meal had been touted as an effective fertilizer (amongst many other materials), at the Cape Colony, some scientists advocated for the use of human bones from the local prison stations, made up predominately of incarcerated persons of color. This paper dissects the consequences of the mobility of scientific knowledge, in its global iterations and local experiences, while framing the use of human remains as fertilizer as a violent and racialized colonial practice.

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Paper short abstract:

From the 1950s winegrape cultivation rose exponentially in several countries. In exploring the role of state-funded science-for-industry in this expansion I argue that the international career of the USA's Harold Olmo is a key to understanding changing human-Vitis relations in global context.

Paper long abstract:

In the late twentieth century state-funded science for industry contributed to changing human-Vitis relations through modernizations that ultimately spurred the globalization of the wine trade from countries such as Australia and elsewhere. Students travelled from around the world to learn from American grape scientist Harold Olmo at the Department of Viticulture and Enology, University of California, Davis. Olmo in turn travelled and networked extensively from the 1950s to 1970s, including to Australia, as the USA exerted Cold War soft power through cultural, economic and scientific exchange. He also extended his international networks through corresponding with representatives of other governments, not-for-profit organisations, business and industry. Olmo’s professional archive in UC Davis Special Collections reveals the professor’s wide reach in the diffusion of modern methods of grape production and also grape mass production in which winegrapes were a subset, not always the main game. Olmo bred new grapevine clones. He advised on the up-scaling of vine management systems, engineered irrigation, and machines for pruning and harvesting. As one of the most influential grape scientists of the postwar era, Olmo’s networks and innovations provide a framework for interrogating the environmental effects of the emergence of the contemporary global winescape.

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Paper short abstract:

I explore vineyard expansion in the Negev over last forty years. With searing heat and little rain, growers experimented with techniques that anticipate changes other nations will adopt in the face of climate change, from trellising, and saline tolerant vines to testing theories of water stress.

Paper long abstract:

This paper interrogates vineyard expansion in Israel’s Negev Desert over last forty years. With searing heat and little rain, growers experimented with viticultural practices that anticipate changes other nations will adopt in the face of climate change. Trellising practices, for example, provided greater shade for grapes. Vignerons also experimented with rootstocks that were better able to tolerate the higher saline levels because brackish groundwater contains salt from the Mediterranean. Considering the stress of limited water resources, they also explored which grape varieties and clones responded more quickly and flavorably to harsh environmental conditions. In addressing these ecological restraints, the paper will touch on the larger cultural context of grape growing in the Negev from Israel’s contested status of as a settler colonial state to the production of kosher wines for a secular audience and the challenges of infiltrating the global market given Israel’s smaller yields and consumer perceptions of desert production.

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Paper short abstract:

The double-pruning technique allows late harvest grapes to make "Winter wines", during the drier months and with greater thermal amplitude, mild nights, and sunny days. Thus, vineyards have been introduced in regions with specific climate conditions, which can be affected by extreme climate events.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1980s, viticulture has occupied unimagined regions for vineyards. Examples include the establishment in areas with little tradition with viticulture in the United States, in European countries such as Norway and the Netherlands, and in China. This phenomenon also finds an echo in Latin America. In this context, the present work focuses on the new territories of vineyards and wines in Brazil. Areas that, were practically unthinkable in having vineyards of Vitis vinífera to produce fine wines, emerged in the twenty-first century. Territories of the states of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Goiás, are some examples that will be addressed, which have the support of technologies developed in the research centers. One of the greatest advances was developed by the Agricultural Research Company of Minas Gerais, responsible for the establishment and development of the technique of double pruning or inverted pruning. The double-pruning technique allows late-harvest grapes to make "Winter wines", during the drier months and with greater thermal amplitude, mild nights, and sunny days. This double-pruning technique was mainly responsible for these new wine frontiers in Brazil. Thus, vineyards have been introduced in regions with specific climate conditions, which can be affected by extreme climate events.

The private sector disseminated the technique with commercial nurseries and consultancies for the implementation of vineyards in these regions. We will also discuss the establishment of profiles that are distinct from the wineries established in the South of the country.

(Thanks to CNPq and FAPESC for the Scholarship and financial support).

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how ecological crisis – prolonged drought, rapidly expanding groundwater use, followed by salinization and groundwater contamination – led to a broader economic crisis and dramatic refashioning of the Argentine wine industry in the 1970s.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the dramatic expansion, development of new techniques, and crisis and retrenchment in the Argentine wine industry between the mid 1960s and the mid 1980s. It traces the attempt at a technical fix for persistent problems in water access, the far graver ecological problems that technical fix created, and the way this ecological crisis helped to drive a dramatic refashioning of the political economy, productive practices, and environmental management of wine in Argentina, the fifth largest industry in the world. A stalwart of the internal market was painfully remade into an export powerhouse.

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Paper short abstract:

As global temperatures have risen and wildfires become more common, the wine industry is trying to ways to salvage fire-fouled wine. I trace the history of wine taint and the efforts to mitigate its threat through science, technology, and agro-ecology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Paper long abstract:

As wildfires clouded the mid-day sun and turn a normally blue sky orange, wine makers in Napa Valley worried about wildfires ruining yet another vintage of their prestigious wines just as they were getting ready to harvest in August of 2021. It was not just the threat of wildfires cresting the mountains and burning vines that worried winemakers, but also the direction of the wind that could blow smoke into the vineyards and cause smoke taint in seemingly perfect grapes. Smoke taint makes wine taste like the ash from a cigarette or worse rendering the wine undrinkable. As global temperatures have risen and wildfires become more common not just in fire prone California, but in Australia, South Africa, Southern Europe and the usually damp Pacific Northwest, the wine industry is trying to ways to salvage fire-fouled wine. This paper traces the history of wine taint and the efforts of industry professionals and university researchers to mitigate its threat through science, technology, and agro-ecology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.