Don’t bother burying your toad

As we approached a recent long weekend, I found myself staring vaguely at Google Maps – hoping that if I looked long enough, an exotic location would suddenly appear within easy drive of Perth. Maybe a place with a few Michelin stars, or at least a Bib Gourmand or two.  

Of course, the ocean always stays watery, and the desert always stays sandy, and I usually head somewhere isolated and spectacularly beautiful; the serenity making me regret ever having doubted WA. Although in this case, I stayed in Perth and went to the zoo. Indeed, isolation does have its perks beyond staggering beauty, providing a buffer against those pesky infectious diseases that aim to do harm to those we all hold most dear: the vines.  

Grape phylloxera (Daktulosphaira vitifoliae) is an invasive parasitic pest which, in a way that in no way parallels current events, was endemic to the USA before spreading its nefarious influence around most of the grape-growing world. They are pale yellow sap-suckers related to aphids that feed on the roots and leaves of grapevines; fascinating in lots of ways, with a life cycle that includes up to 18 stages divided into four ‘forms’: sexual, leaf, root and winged. Of these stages, the most brilliantly named is the ‘fundatrix’ (or stem-mother) which lays its eggs parthenogenetically in a leaf gall, created by injecting its saliva into the grape leaf.  

As interesting and disgusting as their life cycle may be, they are most famous for the absolute destruction they wrought through the vineyards of Europe in the late 19th century. Brought across from North America in vine specimens in the 1850s, it destroyed vines throughout Britain before heading to mainland Europe, where vines started to fall ill initially in the Southern Rhone; before rapidly spreading across the continent destroying (by some estimates) nine out of every ten vineyards. Regrettably, the practice of burying a live toad under each vine to “draw out the poison” was less successful at stopping the spread than one may hope.  

These days, the most common way of resisting the aphid-esque scourge is to graft the desired grape variety onto an American root stock, with these vine roots being inherently resistant to the disease and thus disrupting their lifecycle. 

Most French vines are thus viticultural versions of Frankenstein’s monster, sewn together with the roots from America and the grape-growing branches from France.  

Yet, because of our isolation, WA (along with Tasmania and South Australia) remain phylloxera-free, with those pesky root-nibbling parasites yet to have journeyed across from those infested farmlands in the east. 

This means many of the vines in WA remain ungrafted, with the original Vitis vinifera rootstock still able to draw its nutrients from our ancient soil, unaffected by any American influence.  

Does that have much of an influence? Tough to say, but probably not a great amount. Either way, next time you’re complaining about how you’re not allowed to walk through vineyards anymore or groaning about declaring muddy boots at customs, just remember it’s done to protect those most vulnerable amongst us: the innocent vines.