Today, we're accustomed to thinking of Italian wine as a product with a thousand-year history: indeed, this is true, even if many are unaware that wine production in Italy was on the verge of extinction. From the mid-19th century onwards, several grapevine diseases threatened to eliminate wine production in Italy. The first was powdery mildew (also known as "powdery disease"), but the most damaging was phylloxera, an "insect capable of causing serious root damage and the subsequent death of the plant." The final blow, however, was dealt by downy mildew, a disease that first appeared in 1887. These pests were also called "American pests" because they originated in the Americas; they represent one of the negative effects of global trade. Many farmers across Italy were even forced to change the use of their land: one example is the city of Vignola, whose vines, affected by phylloxera, were later replaced by cherries. Today, the city of Vignola is world-famous for its cherry cultivation. Finally, Italian wine was saved thanks to a technique of grafting American vines, initially fiercely contested by Italian farmers. In 1895, the scientist Ferdinando Vallese sounded the alarm, urging farmers to adopt American rootstocks to save what remained of their wine production. Indeed, the use of carbon disulfide—the primary tool for preventing epidemics—was no longer sufficient, and the example Vallese considered a positive one was France, where, thanks to grafted vines, farmers had defeated phylloxera. In Italy, the reconstruction process took much longer than in France: in the 1930s, the damage caused by phylloxera was still being discussed. However, the adoption of American grafts ultimately saved Italian viticulture: as Grandi and Soffiati write, "one can certainly understand the attachment to centuries-old roots [...], but without American grafts, and without the chemistry that helped make the vine resistant to many diseases, Italian and European wine would no longer exist."