ABSTRACT

Viticulture had known a long and honourable past in pre-Revolutionary France, with lord and peasant utilising their expertise to produce the fruit of the vine in a wide range of environments, including many that would now be judged too marginal for successful cultivation (Dion 1959). According to some contemporaries, viticulture was taking land that was needed for grain; for others, it was lamentable that vines were being planted where insolation and soil were inadequate to yield palatable wine. Many other parts of the viticultural realm managed to escape the devastation of phylloxera during the second cadastral phase. In complete contrast, viticulture declined massively in the south-west where départements lost more than 1000 ha each year, which represented a combined loss of 497 910 ha between 1879 and 1907 (Fig. 8.2d). Vine growing had occupied 17.1 per cent of Charente in the ancien cadastre but a mere 4.0 per cent in 1907 (Bernard 1978).