This French statue depicts the American “New World” as a young woman propping up a sickly old woman – France. The grateful French erected it at Montpellier in gratitude for U.S. help in defeating phylloxera, a parasite destroying French vineyards. Photo courtesy of Robert Scheef
by Don Corrigan
Americans visiting wine country in France often express surprise when coming upon an intriguing statue in Montpellier. It depicts a younger woman holding and soothing an older woman.
The statue is a representation of France and America helping one another with viticulture. When France’s vineyards were dying from the pest, phylloxera, in the 1800s, Missourians came to the rescue.
Missouri vineyard experts gave French winemakers American rootstock, which is resistant to the parasite. The trick involved grafting the majority of France’s grape plants with hearty American rootstock.
The “Wine Ladies” statue celebrates this curative. An older woman depicts France as ill and dying, whereas the younger woman illustrates America coming to help and soothe. It is a very touching story.
Missouri Wine Country gave a vineyard gift not only to France, but to the world. The Missouri Botanical Garden’s Henry Shaw was a lover of grapes, a wine enthusiast, and he consorted with Missouri’s viniculture experts.
Shaw’s cadre of viniculture specialists included George Engelmann, Charles V. Riley, George Husmann and Hermann Jaeger. When the parasite known as phylloxera began destroying Europe’s wine industry in the 1870s, Shaw’s experts reacted.
Engelmann and other Missouri horticulturalists, including Husmann and Jaeger, developed and organized a shipment of phylloxera-resistant American grapevines to send to France.
The shipped grapevines were used as hardy root stocks to which European vines were grafted. The grafting enabled the French vines to withstand the deadly attack and Europe’s wine industry was saved.
Grafting techniques, then and now, are a more environmentally-friendly way to address plant maladies than pesticides. DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was developed in the 1940s as the first modern synthetic pesticide. However, synthetics are not always environmentally-friendly.
The defeat of phylloxera through grafting was a major triumph of modern biology over a horticultural disaster for Europe. Henry Shaw’s scientist and horticulture friends played pivotal roles in the solution.
As phylloxera has become pandemic, grapes across the globe are now grafted on to the resistant root stocks which have American origins.
“Grafting The Grape”
Study at the University of Missouri Southwest Center Agricultural Experiment Station in Mt. Vernon has revealed how various rootstock/scion combinations modify traits of the overall grape plant. These findings were taken up at the 2021 “Grafting the Grape” Exhibition at MoBot. Photo by Allison Miller
Nezka Pfeifer, curator for the Peter Sachs Museum at MoBot, put together “Grafting the Grape” in 2021 at the Botanical Garden. The exhibit explored various American grape species most used in viticulture, grafting and winemaking.
Pfeifer focused on 16 different American varieties of grapes in the 2021 exhibition. Grapes in the “New World” were not always easy to work with, but they were certainly plentiful.
“German settlers who came to Missouri brought their winemaking expertise and used it on the native grapes,” explained Pfeifer. “They found grapes here that they knew they could grow successfully – and that made them successful winemakers.”
Pfeifer studied the work of key figures in early grape horticulture, including Shaw, Engelmann, Riley, Husmann and Jaeger. Shaw and Engelmann had strong interests in grape vines locally, nationally and globally.
Engelmann worked closely with Isidor Bush, owner of St. Louis’ largest nursery, to publish the Illustrated descriptive catalogue of American grape-vines. The 1875 catalog was later translated to French. It became the definitive work delineating North American Vitis species.
In contrast to Engelmann’s catalog of grapevines, Shaw himself published The Vine and Civilization in 1884. This work alone should qualify the Botanical Garden’s Shaw as a hero for Missouri Wine Country.
The Vine and Civilization
Shaw was an unabashed “tub thumper,” (an early word for a public relations specialist) in touting the character and attributes of wine. In his study, Shaw calls grapevines the source of the “first liquor in the world.”
Shaw also contends in his study that consumption of wine can be a measure of a people’s advancement to civilized status. He quotes Europe’s Professor J. Babrius, a teacher in Bordeaux, as saying the most civilized countries are wine-drinking countries.
“Wine has played such an important part in the history of the human race, has had such a powerful influence on the health and on the moral life of mankind, that it is of no little importance in the study of the culture of the vine,” Babrius insisted.
Shaw goes onto cite Babrius’ assertions that the Egyptians, and then the Greeks, succeeded in every manner because of their devotion to the product of their vineyards. He said their poets, historians, statesmen and physicians are exemplary models for all the world.
“Greece has thrown on the world the seeds of an inexhaustible civilization,” declared Babrius. “Wine was the material principle that raised and sustained Greek civilization to an elevation no other civilization ever attained.”
Curator Pfeifer is impressed by the final section of Shaw’s book, The Vine and Civilization, in which he describes different wines from around the world and emphasizes characteristics that make them great.
Shaw was well-travelled and an avid collector of wine, according to Pfeifer. At the time of his death in 1889, he owned 3,000 bottles from the finest vineyards. Pfeifer hinted that his preference for certain wines in his book may have added value and prestige to what was in his own cellar.
Another Wine Sculpture
Artist Paul Granlund’s bronze sculpture at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis serves to remind visitors of Henry Shaw’s love for wine and vineyards. Located near Shaw’s home the sculpture represents garden founder Shaw’s dedication to grape culture, winemaking and horticulture. Photo courtesy of MoBot Archives
A wine sculpture dedicated to Shaw at the Botanical Garden in St. Louis is an iconic part of the garden landscape. The sculpture’s design represents garden founder Shaw’s devotion to grape culture and winemaking.
The sculpture shows Henry standing at a bench, which is located near his house. Vine patterns in artist Paul Granlund’s sculpture serve to remind viewers of Shaw’s love for wine, the vine, and horticulture generally.
“He who has a good cellar well-filled cannot too soon make himself acquainted with its management and with the history of that beverage,” Shaw observed. “Used in due moderation, (wine) may be reckoned among the most precious gifts of heaven to the temperate and rational man.”
For those unable to make the trip to Montpellier, France, to see the “Wine Ladies,” a visit to the Missouri Botanical Garden to see the sculpture of Henry Shaw and his vines can be equally inspiring.
Missourians can be proud of their state’s contribution to global wine culture. As Shaw suggested in his book, wine has had a powerful influence on the health and on the moral life of mankind.
(This story was adapted from Don Corrigan’s original piece for the January “Off The Vine” page, which appears monthly in the Washington Missourian)
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