Alicante Henri Bouschet

Alicante Henri Bouschet is the grandchild of Teinturier and Aramon. Henri Bouschet crossed Petit Bouschet with Grenache in 1855 at the Domaine de la Calmette, and DNA markers confirm the cross he recorded (VIVC). A. Bedel, in his 1890 Les nouvelles méthodes de culture de la vigne et de vinification, lists 4 forms of it, early and late among them, and calls them vines with red, extremely colored juice, very fertile.

The Gironde books record no vineyard planted with it. Pierre Viala, in Les maladies de la vigne (1893), wrote that anthracnose had made its cultivation impossible in the vineyards of the center and the southwest of France. Its name reached Bordeaux another way. In the 1922 edition of Bordeaux et ses vins by Charles Cocks and Édouard Féret, the reference book of the Bordeaux trade, the chapter on rootstocks for the replanted vineyard lists “Alicante Bouschet × Riparia 141” for clay and silica soils that pack down under rain. Earlier still, the international phylloxera congress held in Bordeaux in 1881 reported grafts of Alicante-Bouschet on Riparia.

Oldest record in my library: “Alicante-Bouschet”, 1881, in the Compte rendu général of the Congrès international phylloxérique de Bordeaux (grafts and rootstock trials); Pierre Viala, Les maladies de la vigne, 1893 (southwest France); for the Gironde, Cocks and Féret, Bordeaux et ses vins, 9th edition, 1922 (as a rootstock parent)