Albert Macquin: the man who saved St Emilion vineyards from Phylloxera

Nothing in Albert Macquin’s background suggested he would be the saviour of St Emilion vineyards.

Born François-Albert Macquin, on June 14 1852, in Seine-et-Marne, on the outskirts of Paris. After leaving school, he first studied law, with a break from 1873 to 1874 for his military service under the Third Republic, just after the Franco-Prussian war.

Law clearly hadn’t gripped him, because when an agricultural college opened in Paris in 1874, he signed up for its inaugural programme. On graduation, he chose farming rather than viticulture, heading back to his home town in the Ile de France to start an agricultural business growing beetroot for sugar beet – a product that had become increasingly important in France after the abolition of slavery in 1848 caused the price of sugar cane to rise sharply.

We’re not exactly sure on what scale he succeeded, but we know that he was already – in his mid 20s – exhaustively researching how to make money in farming, the best methods of production, and how to apply science to smooth the processes. All traits that he would apply to beating Phylloxera a decade later.

You start to understand a little more about his obsessive drive when you read the letters from his father. Baggio uncovered reams of disapproving correspondence – often from third parties that intervened on his father’s account – suggesting that Macquin needed to get serious, settle down, and stop chasing wild dreams. At first his moving to the Gironde region in 1885 was seen as just another flight of fancy, and there are numerous letters from lawyers and notaries suggesting that Macquin Senior was withholding the money his son needed to buy the estate in Montagne St Emilion known as Maison-Neuve, preferring him instead to concentrate on scientific research rather than throwing himself into an ‘uncertain future’.

In fact, Macquin had a clear plan. The price of vineyard land across the Gironde had collapsed because of Phylloxera, and there was still no recognised method of combatting the pest. Many of the biggest chateaux continued to fight against the infestation, but most of the smaller estates simply didn’t have the money to keep trying endless new methods and their vineyards laid in abandon. Macquin writes in letters of the time that the idea of using American vines had barely been taken seriously and that ‘rebuilding the vineyards after Phylloxera is a particularly fascinating challenge’.

All in all an ideal situation for a young agricultural engineer with something to prove – because Macquin by this point was absolutely certain he had a solution that would allow vineyards to return to their former prosperity.

He had spent the previous few years travelling regularly to the Midi, talking to professors at the Montpellier Agricultural School (almost certainly Pierre Viala, who he would have met in Paris), and studying large vineyards that had already been replanted using American vitis Berlandieri rootstocks, and had convinced him that the technique could work. Among his letters is one where he states that these vineyards ‘convinced me that we can replant our non-chalky soils with a certainty of success. This was in fact at the time the sum total of my knowledge of viticulture’

Essentially his idea was to buy land cheaply, put into practise his beliefs, make some money – and prove to his father wrong.

He clearly managed to soothe his father’s nerves somehow because eventually, aged 33, Macquin became owner of Maison-Neuve, a 22ha wine estate with 5ha of fields, three outbuildings, an ox, cows and horses, producing around 2,000 bottles of wine annually and bringing in 8,000 francs per year. This is the property known today as Château Macquin in St-Georges-St -Emilion that is still owned by the Corre-Macquin family, as is the more prestigious Château Pavie-Macquin that also carries his name. As I wrote in Inside Bordeaux, Château Macquin is ‘a hugely important estate for the whole of Bordeaux, although rarely recognised as such’, because this is the site where Macquin carried out his experiments in grafting vines onto American rootstock.

He wasn’t the only figure in Bordeaux to be searching for answers of course. Alcide Bellot des Minières at Château Haut-Bailly was fiercely against grafting, and we can imagine was no friend of Albert Macquin – he was busy creating a product from ammonia and copper to kill the insect, intent on protecting his old ungrafted vines, many of which are still alive at Haut-Bailly today. Then there was Ferdinand Bouffard, who owned a small estate near Château Pavie, and benefitted from the crisis by buying Pavie itself, an estate that he then treated with carbon disulphide, a strong poisonous insecticide that smelt terrible but had limited success.

When Macquin first arrived at Maison-Neuve, in contrast, he immediately began experimenting with rootstocks. He had written on arrival, ‘vines no longer exist in my neighbours’ estates’, and noted that his new home produced 4 tonneaux of wine per year where 10 years earlier it had made 48 tonneaux.

Piecing things together from archives of letters and later remembrances (including his own biography), plus a paper trail of correspondence with neighbouring chateaux and vine nurseries, we see that he produced 20,000 grafted vine plants in 1885, and 195,000 in 1886. And the obsession quickly grew.

Baggio writes of the Phylloxera period, ‘Albert Macquin doesn’t live at Maisonneuve. He lives on trains, in hotels, at friends’ houses. He gets his mail sent to the Grand Hotel de Bordeaux, or the Grand Hotel de Libourne’.

In the records uncovered by Baggio – and other historians such as René Pijassou and Henri Enjalbert – you find he had around 150 clients from 1887 to 1889 and sold around one million grafted plants, plus 26,000 rootstocks and 160,000 cuttings, making an average of 6,600 grafted plants per customer, likely enough to cover 180ha, not including the rootstocks and cuttings. To add to this, he started a grafting school out of his estate to teach the technique, receiving around 40 students per year.

His intention, he stated, was to democratise access to grafting, ‘giving the technique to normal working people in the vineyards…’. We know that specialist Italian grafters worked in the Beaujolais in 1885 and in Burgundy in 1890 because the locals didn’t understand the technique, and Macquin hoped that his simple grafting technique, that bore his name, would give those who learnt it an ability to once again earn a livelihood from viticulture. He also wrote, ‘it was with my knowledge as a vine nurseryman that I was able to rebuild my vineyard and to increase my vineyard holdings’.

And it worked – by the mid 1890s Macquin owned 70ha of vines that he had assembled from over 15 different owners – including prestigious plots around the St Emilion plateau that are today Pavie-Macquin.

Enjalbert described him a little scathingly as ‘an industrialist of the vines, and the grand master of transformation of the St Emilion vineyard’ – but acknowleged the scale of his work, ‘both directly through his own vineyards, and indirectly by his management of other estates, the teams he worked with, his school and vine nurseries, and the inspiration he offered across the whole of the Libourne area’.

By the time of his death, in 1911, he had been awarded medals for his work, and regularly received groups of students and others vineyards owners to admire the success of the grafted vines. Professors of viticulture, such as Pierre Viala in Monpellier, asked him to sent examples of his vines to add to their collections. His legacy may be questioned a little now – the unstoppable growth of Merlot across the Right Bank at that time, for example, is directly attributable to the ease with which the variety took to grafting, but his name deserves recognition.

With reference to a thesis written in 1990 by Carol Baggio at the University of Bordeaux, entitled ‘Albert Macquin Entrepeneur Viticole 1852-1911’.

 

Also read:
Pre-Phylloxera Old Vines at Château de la Vieille Chapelle
Pavie-Macquin vertical 1998-2019