Lilian Bérillon of Pépinière Bérillon, a French nursery near Orange specialized in massale selections, has just produced a film (with English subtitles) that is well worth a watch. Obviously, Bérillon is partisan, but the calibre of the growers who have participated (Lalou Bize-Leroy, Jean-Louis Chave, Peter Sisseck, etc) speaks to the interest of the subject and what he has to say. We talk a lot about terroir, a lot about winemaking, more and more about farming, but still not enough about plants and genetics. Seeing the parcels of devigorated and dying 161-49B rootstock in the Côte d’Or this summer only underlined to me how central these questions are. So I thought this was worth flagging up to people who may have missed it.
william, is the science/logic behind the french law that demands clones for rootstock vis a vis phylloxera?
i’m assuming the rootstocks are some hybrids of vitis aestavilis/rupestris/berlanderi, but the scion grafts will be of the growing tips, which will be vitis vinifera? hence the ban?
It dates back to the early 1970s, when the preoccupation was with eliminating virus. Clonal selections in the short-term did indeed deliver healthier vineyards, but now it may be that we are paying the price. Around 85% of the 161-49 rootstock planted in all of France, for example, which is having such problems today, is derived from just two individuals… The rules are more relaxed for the vinifera part of the graft, but even then, there are zero state subsidies for massale selections, only for clones.
Big demand for rootstock/vines, such as occurred after the frost of 1985 when a lot of vines had to be replaced in a short time, also places pressure on nurseries that can result in sloppy practices, and the results just get replicated.
Given all that, what’s the backstory on why Chateau Ferriere, whom I understand inherited the old vines from Chateau Bel Air Marquis d’Aligre, removed the old vines entirely without doing any massale selection? While I understand from you that those vines were a bit of a mess, and subjected to pesticides for decades, the old vine genetics were probably pretty interesting.
I do not know who has taken over the BAMA vineyards, or if they have been all/partially replanted, but sometimes old vineyards are too virused to permit taking a massale selection. There are also rules against propagating virused vine material, even if they can be bent a bit in practice.
sorry but to come back to this - is virus still a problem? esca is a fungus, so the selection process wont’ help there, right? what sort of rootstocks could france return to that would not be clones but still would give virus resistance?
It’s not about the rootstocks being resistant to virus (this sort of resistance doesn’t exist in plants) - it’s about having rootstock material that is free of virus. This leads to clones and limited genetic material, when Berillon would be interested in having genetic diversity in rootstocks in the same way that massal selection gives genetic diversity in the scion
Interesting. I know a lot of estates in burgundy working with massal selection, but always thought they were speaking of vinifera (so taking cutting of well-performing old vines).
Already answered by Jamie, but yes, massale selections of rootstocks would involve replicating material from non-clonal plantings (i.e. anything before 1971).
Yes, they are. As observed above, rootstocks have to be clonal by law. So everyone is grafting their massale selections of vinifera onto clonal rootstocks.
The whole purpose of the clonal selection program at its inception was to replicate genetic material that was uncontaminated, or minimally contaminated, by virus…
