The “global wine periphery” during Europe’s phylloxera crisis: production, trade, and consumption between 1870 and 1940
It is a well known fact that wine production in Europe suffered a heavy blow in the 1870s and 1880s at the hands of phylloxera, a root-infesting pest that left the continent’s vineyards in complete ruin. And a good deal of research has been dedicated to study not only the crisis itself, but also its profound and long-term consequences on wine production, market regulation and consumption in the affected countries. However, much less attention, has been paid so far to the effects of Europe’s phylloxera-crisis in the world beyond the then dominant centres of wine growing, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. There were, undoubtedly, long-standing traditions of wine consumption e.g. in most of the countries of Latin America. And in an age of mass migration the habit of wine drinking as well as the knowledge of producing it spread also to North America and other parts of the globe. It is therefore not surprising that in many places around the world increasing efforts to establish a domestic wine production could also be observed. However, despite all efforts, wine consumption in many of the countries of the wine growing “periphery” still relied heavily on imports from European producers at that time and was therefore severely hit by the production slump caused by phylloxera.