The Botanist And The Vintner (2005)

It's a familiar story: A foreign force invades French soil and is repulsed with help from America. But this war — which occurred in the mid-1860s — was waged by an army of scientists and bureaucrats against a microscopic insect decimating vineyards in southeastern France and threatening the European wine industry. It was a modest French botanist, with assistance from an American entomologist, who convinced skeptical authorities that salvation lay in an astonishingly simple technique. Ecology, politics, and free-market economics collide in this brisk and surprisingly modern tale of scientific sleuthing.