Charles Valentine Riley: The American Who Helped Save French Wine

France was saved from phylloxera partly by a London-born entomologist working out of Missouri — the same country the insect had come from. (See also: phylloxera and Europe’s changing drinking habits.)

Charles Valentine Riley (1843–1895) confirmed what Jules-Émile Planchon suspected, supplied the American vines that became the cure, and pressed the case for grafting when much of French science was still arguing. France decorated him with the Legion of Honour for it. For more, see wine and Valentine’s Day.

An Englishman in Missouri

Riley was born in Chelsea, London, on 18 September 1843 (a few sources give the 19th), educated partly in Europe, and emigrated to the United States as a young man, working on an Illinois farm before turning to entomology and illustration — he drew his own insects, superbly.¹² In 1868 he was appointed the first State Entomologist of Missouri, the same year Planchon was naming phylloxera in France.

Missouri mattered here. It sits in the native range of the American grapevines that had lived alongside phylloxera for millennia, so Riley knew the insect not as a mysterious plague but as an ordinary local pest — and he had noticed that native vines were rarely damaged by it.¹³

Settling the argument

When French naturalists split over whether phylloxera caused the blight or merely accompanied it, Riley’s American evidence was decisive. He compared specimens, established that the American root-feeding form and the insect devastating France were the same species — the formal identity determination was made in 1870 by Victor Signoret, working from material Riley sent — and backed Planchon publicly.³⁴

Then he did the practical thing. From 1870 he shipped resistant American vine material to Planchon in France; and in the early 1870s he crossed to France to meet him and see the destruction for himself.²³ The grafting solution grew directly out of that collaboration.

Beyond phylloxera

Phylloxera was one campaign in a remarkable career. Riley chaired the U.S. Entomological Commission from 1876–77 and headed the USDA’s Division of Entomology (1878–79 and 1881–94), and he is widely regarded as a founder of modern economic entomology — the discipline of managing insects that damage crops. He was an early champion of biological control — the 1888 introduction of the vedalia beetle to rescue California’s citrus groves is the classic case.¹²

France did not forget the debt: he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1884.¹²

An abrupt end

Riley died on 14 September 1895, four days before his fifty-second birthday. Riding a bicycle down a hill in Washington, his wheel struck a granite paving block that had fallen from a wagon; he was thrown to the pavement and fractured his skull.¹⁵ By then the vineyards of France were being rebuilt on the roots he had helped send them.

This day in wine history

• 18 September 1843 — Charles Valentine Riley is born in Chelsea, London.
• 14 September 1895 — Riley dies in a bicycle accident in Washington, D.C.

Read more

• Jules-Émile Planchon: the botanist who named the devastator
• Phylloxera: how one insect nearly ended wine
• Why almost every wine grape grows on American roots
• Birthdays in wine history

References

1. Charles Valentine Riley — birth, career, USDA roles, Legion of Honour, death (corroborated). ↩
2. National Agricultural Library, Charles Valentine Riley Collection. ↩
3. Sorensen, Smith, Smith & Carton, “Charles V. Riley, France, and Phylloxera,” American Entomologist 54(3), 2008. ↩
4. Great French Wine Blight — Riley’s confirmation of Planchon’s theory (corroborated). ↩
5. Sorensen, Smith, Smith & Weber, Charles Valentine Riley: Founder of Modern Entomology, University of Alabama Press. ↩

Want to read more? Try these books

Phylloxera Christy Campbell

Wine Grapes Robinson, Harding & Vouillamoz

The Story of Wine Hugh Johnson

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