If one were to write a history of oenology, it would be tempting to begin with Louis Pasteur. Some historians, lured into finding more remote roots of oenological theory and practice, begin with Adamo Fabbroni, author of a prize-winning work (1785) on the art of making wine rationally, which was translated into French in 1801 – a vintage year for oenological work. Pasteur noted Fabbroni's originality in experimentally identifying a cause of fermentation (“la matière végéto-animale”, presumably gluten) and saluted him as “the principal promoter of modern ideas on the nature of the fermenting agent”. In spite of his favorable if critical reception by French chemists – for example, Fourcroy – and the publication of his ideas in the Annales de chimie, Fabbroni has practically disappeared from the history of wine. French scientists merely replaced him by themselves.

Pasteur thought that he himself had replaced just about all scientists who had worked on wine, though he granted previous writers (chiefly Lavoisier, Chaptal, and Gay-Lussac) the status of worthy predecessors. There was one figure who could not be relegated to that limited position: Jean-Antoine Chaptal, one of the power elite to whom Pasteur usually showed the proper deference. Chaptal was a rich man – though he died poor – versed in medicine and science, a respectable chemist, a best-selling author, an industrialist, and a powerful politician of the First Empire.