Beaumont, France

THE vines were once demonised for causing madness and blindness, and had been banned decades ago. The French authorities, brandishing money and sanctions, nearly wiped them out.

But there they were. On a hillside off a winding mountain road in a lost corner of southern France, the forbidden crop was thriving. Early one recent evening, Hervé Garnier inspected his field with relief.

In a year, when an April frost and disease have decimated France's overall wine production, his grapes - an American hybrid variety named jacquez and banned by the French government since 1934 - were already turning red. Barring an early-autumn cold snap, all was on track for a new vintage.

"There's really no reason for its prohibition," Mr Garnier said. "Prohibited? I'd like to understand why, especially when you see the prohibition rests on nothing."

He is one of the last stragglers in a long-running struggle against the French wine establishment and its allies in Paris. The French government has tried to rip the jacquez and five other American vine varieties out of French soil for the past 87 years, arguing that they are bad for human physical and mental health - and produce bad wine.

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But in recent years, the hardiness of the American varieties has given a lift to guerrilla winemakers like him, as climate change wreaks havoc on vineyards across Europe and natural wines made without the use of pesticides have grown in popularity.

Despite France's pledge in 2008 to halve the use of pesticides, it has continued to rise in the past decade. Vineyards occupied just over 4 per cent of France's agricultural area but used 15 per cent of all pesticides nationwide in 2019, noted the Agriculture Ministry.

Christian Sunt, a member of Forgotten Fruits, a group fighting for the legalisation of the American grapes, said: "These vines ensure bountiful harvests, without irrigation, without fertilisers and without treatment." Showing off forbidden vines, including the clinton and isabelle varieties, on a property in the southern Cévennes region, near the town of Anduze, he added: "These vines are ideal for making natural wine."

American grapes have long played a central role in the tumultuous and emotional history of wine between France and the United States - alternately threatening French production and reviving it.

It all started in the mid-1800s when vines native to the United States were brought over to Europe with a piggybacking louse known as phylloxera. While the American vines were resistant to the pest, their European counterparts did not stand a chance. The ravenous lice attacked their roots, choking off the flow of nutrients to the rest of the plant - and causing the biggest crisis in the history of French wine. The lice destroyed millions of acres, shut down vineyards and sent jobless French to Algeria, a French colony.

After a quarter century of helplessly watching the collapse of Europe's traditional wine culture, the wine world's best minds had an epiphany. The cure was in the poison: the American vines.

Some vintners grafted European vines onto the resistant American rootstocks. Others crossbred American and European vines, producing what became known as the American hybrids, like the jacquez.

Faced with seeming extinction, France's wine industry bounced back.

Thierry Lacombe, an ampelographer (vine expert) who teaches at Montpellier SupAgro, a French university specialising in agriculture, said: "That left an impression to this day. It wasn't the only time that the Americans, our American friends, came to save the French." The French wine world was split between supporters of grafting and hybrid grapes.

The grafters kept producing wine from pinot, merlot, cabernet sauvignon and other classic European grapes. The American hybrids, they often said, smelled like fox urine.

Still, the American hybrids thrived all over France. Sturdier and easier to grow, they were especially popular in rural areas like the Cévennes. Families planted them on hillsides, where other crops were impossible to grow. They let them grow on top of arbours, cultivating potatoes underneath, as a way to make every inch of land productive. Villagers harvested and made wine together, using a common cellar.

With France awash in wine, lawmakers urgently addressed the problem around Christmas in 1934. To reduce overproduction, they outlawed the six American vines - including hybrids like the jacquez and pure American grapes like the isabelle - mainly on the grounds that they produced poor wine. Production for private consumption would be tolerated, but not for commercial sale.

The government had planned to follow up with bans on other hybrids, but stopped because of the backlash to the initial ban, Mr Lacombe said.

Then the war provided another reprieve.

It was only in the 50s, when hybrids were still cultivated on a third of all French vineyards, that the government really began cracking down on the six forbidden grapes, Mr Lacombe said. It offered incentives to rip out the offending vines, then threatened growers with fines.

It then condemned the American grapes as harmful to body and sanity with arguments "not completely honest to try to quell a situation that was slipping away from the government", he said.

"In fact, the present defenders of these vines are right in underlining all the historical and government inconsistencies," he added.

The clinton and jacquez might have met a quiet death if not for a back-to-the-land movement that, starting in the 70s, brought people like Mr Garnier to the Cévennes.

With the growing threat of climate change and the backlash against the use of pesticides, he is hoping that the forbidden grapes will be legalised and that France's wine industry will open up to a new generation of hybrids - as Germany, Switzerland and other Europeans nations already have.

"France is a great wine country," he said. "To remain one, we have to open up. We can't get stuck on what we already know." NYTIMES