Konstantin Frank (1899–1985) was born in a German enclave in the Ukraine not far from Odessa, and he always considered himself German rather than Russian. He grew up working in his father’s vineyard and making wine. At the time of the Russian Revolution, in 1917, he was studying viticulture, and after the civil war in 1924 he was appointed an assistant professor of viticulture at the agricultural college level. In 1926, he was put in charge of restoring a vineyard nine miles long and four miles wide, near the Dnieper River, which had been ravaged by phylloxera. He restored the vineyard using phylloxera-resistant rootstocks and invented a number of machines for use in the vineyard. In the Ukraine, where winter temperatures could reach -40°F, vines had to be buried in the winter, and Frank invented a grape plow to cover and uncover the vines. He received his doctorate from the Odessa Polytechnic Institute in 1930. The title of his dissertation was “Protection of Grapes from Freezing Damage.”
