The technical dossier of the replanting: a ten-page article from 1909, read closely, and the figures that show how an entire vineyard region was replaced — not with enthusiasm, but with soil, lime and temperature.
Phylloxera
Phylloxera did not arrive in Transylvania as a scientific surprise. It had appeared in Hungary in 1874, at Pancsova, and by 1889 it was attested in the Târnava region. In the meantime growers had tried everything: forced uprooting of diseased vineyards, carbon disulphide treatments, intensive cultivation of the vines.
The 1909 article shows why none of it worked. Carbon disulphide was injected into the soil at 24–28 g/m² and worked only if the vine was still strong; the “cultural method” gave results only on light, dry soils. In Transylvania the old vineyards had roots close to the surface and were planted irregularly — impossible to treat uniformly. The treatments required an ordered vineyard, and the old vineyards were not ordered.
By the late 1890s phylloxera and downy mildew had destroyed, in practice, all the vineyards of the Kokel and Mureș regions. The answer that remained was not to save the diseased vine but to replace it: American rootstock, European scion. A survival technique that became, within two decades, an industry.
The viticulture commission
In 1889 Michael Ambrosi sen. submitted to the council of the Saxon Agricultural Association a memorandum calling for a Viticulture Commission. He did not ask for money, he asked for coordination: who inspects the outbreaks, who orders uprooting, who instructs the growers. The commission was founded, and he became its president.
From 1892 Friedrich Caspari — returned from Klosterneuburg and appointed state commissioner for combating phylloxera — worked alongside him for ten years. Together they held courses and rural sessions in the villages, explained grafting and legitimised it before growers who looked at the American vine with suspicion. The change was not only technical; it was a change in trust.
The result of that period can be seen in two places. The first is in the vineyards: replanted land, vine schools, nurseries. The second is on paper: Michael Ambrosi jun.'s 1909 article is the technical report of the generation that moved from panic to method. The commission did not enter the manuals; it entered the vineyard.
The graft
Choosing a rootstock was not a matter of preference but of soil. Riparia portalis suited fertile, deep soils, neither wet nor too dry, and tolerated no more than 12% calcium carbonate; Rupestris monticola was for light, dry soils in high, warm positions, with a tolerance of up to 30%; Solonis was for deep, wet soils with up to 25% lime, but it did not fully resist phylloxera. The new Berlandieri × Riparia 157 tolerated over 50% lime.
To know which rootstock to choose, the nursery used a Bernard calcimeter — a simple instrument that measured the lime in the soil from the amount of carbon dioxide released. Then came preparation: deep ripping to 60–80 cm, done with mattock and spade, not with explosives as in some parts of Hungary. Planting was at least 120 cm apart.
Grafting had two routes. In the vineyard, the American rootstock was planted and grown for two years, and in the third year, in May, the shoots were green-grafted by simple copulation at 60–80 cm. In the nursery, wooden grafting — English copulation — was followed by “Moosveredlung”: the grafts were laid in moss-lined boxes at 20–24 °C and high humidity, where callus formed in about three weeks. The method made the difference between a trade and an industry.
The nurseries
In 1909 the article spoke of two large nurseries in Transylvania, producing millions of grafts a year and employing together 800–1000 people at the peak of the season. They were not rootstock gardens; they were enterprises with a season, a hierarchy and deliveries on time.
At Buftea, where Michael Ambrosi jun. was associate and director from 1907, the scale is visible in figures: 40 ha of rootstock vineyard, 12 ha of grafted-vine school, 30 ha of apricots and plums, an orchard grown from 10 ha in 1904 to 50 ha in 1909. Irrigation supplied about 3 million litres a day. Eight to ten million rootstocks were produced each year, sold at home or exported to the Baltic countries.
The labour was local and trained at Aiud: in spring, at grafting, at deliveries and at the tree school, 800–1000 people worked daily. Such a concentration of people in a rural economy is hard to imagine today; for the period it meant that the rhythm of the villages moved, in spring, into the nursery. Hence the name “school of vines”: people learned a trade that was exported.
The export
Grafted vines do not sell themselves. They need a catalogue, a price list, a way of paying and a railway wagon. Ambrosi built all four. The 1936 catalogue of the nursery — “Ambrosi, Fischer & Co.”, Aiud — is not a simple list: it carries conditions of sale, guarantees of varietal authenticity, complaint deadlines and a CEC account.
Transport explained the geography. The depots at Mediaș stood beside the railway, and orders left by train: within the monarchy, to the Kingdom of Romania and to the Baltic countries. Later the family would reach South Africa too — Hans Ambrosi led the viticulture department at Stellenbosch between 1954 and 1964 — but that is another branch of the story.
The details in the catalogue show a modern business: payment in advance, the rest by cash on delivery, packing and loading into the wagon charged at 5–10% of the invoice, complaints accepted within eight days. Prices were in lei, and buyers could ask for information on the telephone at Aiud 22. A catalogue is, in the end, a photograph of a market: who buys, what they pay and what they are promised.
The 1909 article
The document behind this page is a ten-page article: “Die Weingartenerneuerung in Siebenbürgen”, signed Michael Ambrosi jun., Nagyenyed (Aiud), printed in 1909 on pages 39–48 of the journal. It is not a memoir; it is a technical report, with soils, figures and methods.
Ambrosi writes as a man who saw failure at close range. He begins with useless uprooting and carbon disulphide, continues with rootstocks, the calcimeter, deep ripping, grafting and the vine school, and ends with varieties and yields. The tone is dry, but it contains a sentence that gives the stakes away: after fifteen years of experience, it can be said that the future belongs to grafting.
The last page is the hardest. Phylloxera, he writes, ravaged the vineyards so badly that many growers were forced to take up their staff and try their luck beyond the ocean. The article does not hide the loss; it names it. That is precisely why it is a document of the replanting, not a brochure for it.
