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BEAUMONT, France – Ivy was once demonized for causing insanity and blindness and was banned decades ago. The French authorities nearly destroyed them by hurling money and sanctions.

But they were there. In a lost corner of southern France, on a hillside above a winding mountain road, the forbidden crop was growing. Early one last evening, Hervé Garnier relaxed and surveyed his field.

In a year in April frost and disease drastically reduced France’s overall wine productionGarnier’s grapes – an American hybrid variety called jacquez, banned by the French government since 1934 – were already turning red. Except for the early autumn chills, everything was on track for a new vintage.

“There’s really no reason why it should be banned,” said Mr. Garnier. “Is it banned? I’d like to understand why, especially when you see that the ban is based on nothing.”

Mr. Garnier is one of the last survivors in the long struggle against the French wine establishment and its allies in Paris. The French government has sought to uproot jaquez and five other American grapevine varieties from French soil for the past 87 years, claiming it is bad for human physical and mental health – and produces bad wine.

But in recent years, as climate change has wreaked havoc on vineyards in Europe and the popularity of natural wines made without pesticides has grown, the hardiness of American varieties has given guerrilla winemakers like him a lift.

Despite France’s promise to halve pesticide use in 2008, it has continued to rise over the past decade. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, vineyards occupied just over 4 percent of France’s agricultural area, but used 15 percent of all pesticides nationwide in 2019.

“These vines yield bountiful harvests without irrigation, fertilizer or treatment,” said Christian Sunt, one of its members. Forgotten FruitsA group fighting for the legalization of American grapes. “These vines are ideal for making natural wines,” he added, showing forbidden vines, including the clinton and isabelle varieties, at a property near the town of Anduze, in the southern Cévennes region.

American grapes have long played a central role in the turbulent and emotional history of wine between France and the United States – alternately threatening and reinvigorating French production.

It all started in the mid-1800s when the vine native to the United States was brought to Europe with a louse on its back known as phylloxera. While American vines are resistant to the pest, their European counterparts didn’t stand a chance. The hungry lice attacked its roots, suffocating the flow of nutrients to the rest of the plant and causing the biggest crisis in French wine history.

Lice destroyed millions of acres, closed vineyards and sent unemployed French to Algeria, a French colony.

After a quarter-century helplessly watching Europe’s traditional wine culture collapse, the wine world’s best minds have had an enlightenment. The cure was in poison: American vines.

Some growers grafted European vines onto hardy American rootstocks. Others have crossed American and European ivy to produce what are known as American hybrids, such as the jacquez.

Faced with extinction, France’s wine industry has bounced back.

“It has made an impression to date,” said Thierry Lacombe, an ampelographer, or vine specialist, who teaches at Montpellier SupAgro, a French university specializing in agriculture. This wasn’t the only time the Americans, our American friends, came to rescue the French.”

The French wine world was divided between supporters of grafting and hybrid grapes.

Grains continued to produce wine from pinot, merlot, cabernet sauvignon and other classic European grapes. They said that American mongrels often smelled like fox urine.

Still, American hybrids flourished all over France. More robust and easier to grow, they were especially popular in rural areas like Cévennes. Families planted them on slopes where it was impossible to grow other crops. As a way of making every inch of the land fertile, they allowed them to grow above the arbors and grow potatoes underneath. The villagers harvested and made wine together using a common cellar.

If pinot noir is part of Burgundy’s identity, the jack has become part of the folklore of northern Cévennes, including the village of Beaumont.

And in southern Cévennes, the clinton (pronounced clain-ton) reigned.

“Here, if you serve a glass of clinton at any bar, people will jump on it,” said Mr. Sunt, a 70-year-old retired forest ranger. “If clinton were legal again, I can tell you, if a winemaker had written clinton on his bottle, he would have sold 10 times more than if he had written syrah or cabernet sauvignon.”

Today, American varieties make up only a small percentage of all French wines. But with grafting and hybrids, production exploded across the country at the beginning of the last century. Algeria also became a major wine exporter to metropolitan France.

While France was drowning in wine, lawmakers urgently addressed the issue at Christmas in 1934. To reduce overproduction, they banned six American grapevines, including hybrids like jacquez and pure American grapes like isabelle, mainly on the grounds that they produced poor wine. Production for private consumption will be tolerated, but not for commercial sale.

Mr Lacombe said the government planned to follow up with bans on other hybrids, but halted it due to the backlash to the initial ban. Then the war brought another relief.

Mr Lacombe said it was only in the 1950s – when hybrids were still grown in a third of all French vineyards – that the government really began to crack down on the six forbidden grapes. It offered incentives to uproot the aggressive vines, then threatened growers with fines.

Later, Mr. Lacombe denounced American grapes as harmful to the body and mind, arguing that “it is not entirely dishonest to try to suppress a government-run situation”.

“In fact, current proponents of these grapevines are right to highlight all the historical and governmental inconsistencies,” he added.

Had it not been for the land-back movement that began in the 1970s and brought people like Mr. Garnier to Cévennes, Clinton and Jacquez might have faced a silent death.

Originally from northeastern France, Mr. Garnier, now 68, was once a long-haired high school student and has traveled to see concerts by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and Janis Joplin. Half a century later, he cheerfully remembers how he avoided mandatory military service after only seven hours in a base where he wanted to see a psychologist, refused to eat with others, and was often frustrating.

A week after his discharge, he aimlessly hitchhiked to the village of Beaumont in Cévennes in 1973 and immediately decided to buy an abandoned property – mostly by repairing roofs in the area and elsewhere.

A few years later, he started winemaking almost by accident. The two elder brothers asked him to harvest the jacquez grapes in exchange for half the wine production. He learned the history of forbidden ties and eventually bought the brothers’ ties.

Today, it produces 3,400 bottles a year of wine made from its dark, fruity “Cuvée des vignes d’antan,” or vines of the past. He circumvented the ban by forming a cultural, non-commercial association,”Memory of the Vine” A membership fee of 10 euros or about 12 dollars gives a bottle.

With the growing threat of climate change and backlash against pesticide use, Mr. Garnier hopes that forbidden grapes will be legalized and France’s wine industry will open up to next-generation hybrids like Germany, Switzerland and other Europeans. nations already exist.

“France is a wonderful wine country,” he said. “We have to open up in order to remain one. We can’t get stuck on what we know.”

Leontine Gallois contributing reporting.