A dire threat to Grapevines

Nearly every month, David Gramaje gives a seminar lecture on the same topic. But the plant pathologist at the Research Centre of the Vine and Wine in Rioja never lacks for an audience of worried Spanish winegrowers. They’ve come to hear about combating esca and other vine-trunk diseases, a threat they fear will be the defining vine blight of the 21st century—a scourge on the scale of phylloxera, the pest that nearly destroyed winemaking in 19th-century Europe.