Today, we grow grapes. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
Many Americans, who were in
favor of invading Iraq, swore off Cognac when
France declined to join us. Well, Cognac turns out
to be much less French than it seems. Our story
begins in 1865, a decade before the French began
building our Statue of
French wine-makers were doing grafting experiments
with American grapes. Some of those grapes carried
a small creature called the phylloxera root
louse. The Phylloxera louse, in turn, carried
a devastating root disease. By the time Miss
Liberty arrived, phylloxera had wiped out most of
the vineyards in the Cognac region. The French
tried every imaginable cure, including some pretty
radical stuff -- like urinating on the vines and
planting toads among their roots.
Grapes are normally grafted on to whatever root
system works best; you don't grow them from seeds.
So the solution to the phylloxera plague was to
turn again to America for a rootstock with a
natural immunity to the disease. But none
of the rootstocks they found here could grow in the
chalk-lime soil of Cognac.
Enter now a man named Thomas Munson. In 1870,
Munson was the second person to graduate from a new
land-grant college that would become the University
of Kentucky. Munson's agricultural studies made a
particularly powerful impression on him. It was
that grapes were, and I quote,
the most beautiful, most wholesome and
nutritious, most certain and most profitable fruit
that could be grown.
By 1877, after a French delegation had come here to
find a rootstock that might survive in Cognac,
Munson's search for the definitive grape had led
him to Denison, in northern Texas. Denison proved
to be a kind of grape heaven for Munson. The French
had searched in vain for ten years, but Munson had
begun publishing articles on his grape hybrids.
When the French finally read his work, they steered
their long pilgrimage toward Texas.
And they found their holy grail here. Munson took
them to the limestone country of central Texas and
showed them rootstocks that would like the soil of
the Cognac region as well as being immune to the
ravages of phylloxera lice. We were soon shipping
thousands of bundles of rootstock to France where
an enormous root-grafting program was begun.
So French cognac was saved. And, in 1888, Munson
was awarded the Chevalier du Mérite
Agricole -- named a knight of agricultural
excellence. He was inducted into the Legion of
Honor. And the French Remembered him: In 1992, the
towns of Cognac and Denison officially joined to
become sister cities.
All this warms my insides -- not the brandy, I
don't even like the stuff -- but, rather, knowing
that the terribly fancy European Cognacs are born
upon a root grown in the middle of Texas.
Underlying all this I find, in Thomas Munson, a
This knight of the grapevine showed us what can
happen when one person combines single-minded study
with a conviction that he can change the world. I
wish I could've known him.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
R. West, Root de France. Kentucky Alumnus.
1988, No. 4, pp. 14-16.
For on-line information about Munson and Cognac,
A TSHA online article.
Here's an on line image of the phylloxera louse
This is a greatly revised version of Episode 214.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2003 by John H.