This book deals with the role of science in the French wine world since the Enlightenment. France, historic center of the civilization and science of wine, is the central concern of the book. The Champagne, Burgundy, and Bordeaux (historically, synecdoche for the southwest) have given us great wines, along with an abundant, sometimes self-congratulatory, literature, much of it scientific. This literature is vital for arriving at an understanding of the historical and contemporary dominance of these wine models as well as for an analysis of the role that science has played in their evolution. The main argument of the book may be baldly stated: the modern or post-phylloxeric vine and its wine are the fruit of the sciences of viticulture and oenology, especially institutional science in Montpellier and Bordeaux. This argument is clearest and strongest in the cases of the reinvention of the vine in the late nineteenth century and the rise and long influence of the school of oenology in Bordeaux. Oenologists and viticultural scientists are being bashed these days in some popular wine guides. In a sense, this book is a historical counterthesis to the argument that the stronger the oenology, the more uninteresting and duller the wine – even if technically perfect. (But even Robert Parker finds good things to say about oenologists outside California.)

Part I of the book deals with the grape vine and the relation of varieties to quality of wine.