Mont d’Orcières had once been covered in fertile, exuberant vineyards, but at the end of the nineteenth century they had been devastated by phylloxera, and carbon disulphide and coal tar had been poured over them. The people would have tried anything to eradicate the disease afflicting their glorious vines, and the chemicals had burnt deep into the layers of soil. But the yellow insects had still won. Here, as everywhere, phylloxera had wiped out the vines, proving that even tiny insects can change the face of the world. For the last thirty years the land on Mont d’Orcières had been considered cursed. Not only had it been poisoned with chemicals, but its shadow loomed over the village, contributing to the feeling that it was the harbinger of doom.

At the beginning, the phylloxera infestation had been like a war. A war many thought it would be easy to win. Even though the insects skipped across whole areas, jumping from one vine to another at the least breath of wind, people refused to view it as fatal. Yet even the most optimistic quickly understood that this was a war that had been lost at the outset, a war against a tiny little parasite a few millimetres long, which managed to destroy the vines across the whole of the country. The entire nation lost to the insects. Over the course of a few springs, all French vineyards were decimated by the greedy aphid, a minuscule creature that buried its eggs at the height of summer like mines that would explode the following spring in the form of docile nymphs, which in turn began to suck the sap from the vine stocks, drying them out and killing them from the bottom up.

There had been vines on Mont d’Orcières for two thousand years. The limestone plateau of Quercy was excellent wine country. In the Middle Ages, this was where black wine was produced for the tables of kings, and for export to England. Back then Bordeaux was merely where the wine from all along the Lot river ended up. But after the advent of the sap-sucking insects, and their treatment with naphthalene and carbon disulphide, the vines were reduced to rows of burnt stalks, aligned like fossilised soldiers or Pompeii gladiators.