One of the stranger little side alleys of booze history is that in order to tell the story of the Sazerac—that most New Orleans of cocktails, essentially an Old Fashioned wearing a beret—you first need to talk about a pale-yellow aphid called phylloxera, which found its way to France about 150 years ago and proceeded to eviscerate the French wine industryPhylloxera lives in the soil and spends its time sucking on the roots of grape vines, which, as it turns out, is a fairly effective way to kill them. At first, farmers didn’t know what was affecting the vines, and could merely witness—concern turning to fear, which then turned to abject panic and horror—as entire fields began to wither and die. It is difficult to overstate the near apocalyptic experience for winemakers, watching waves of destruction slowly roll through their villages and regions. They tried everything—building walls, quarantining or burning afflicted fields, recruiting armies of chickens and toads to eat all the insects—all to no avail. The first case was recorded in the Languedoc, in 1863. By the 1900s, some 70 percent of all vines in France were dead.
Source: Best Sazerac Recipe: How to Make the Rye and Absinthe Cocktail – Robb Report
