Montpellier is the big name in viticultural and oenological research in the Midi, though it is not the only well-known “school” in the Languedoc. Any survey of oenological literature soon reveals the existence of “the Narbonne school of enologists”. In 1895, a year notorious for its vins cassés, the ministry of agriculture founded two oenological stations, one in Narbonne and the other in Montpellier. It was a difficult time for the wine business, and a decade later it would be worse, culminating in the riots of 1907, more bloody in Narbonne than in many parts of the Midi. The government hoped that an injection of science into viticulture would help an important but sick industry. This belief was part of the powerful Pasteurian ideology prescribing science to cure national ills.

In an analysis of the viticultural revolution in the Aude during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Jean Valentin points to a basic change in emphasis, from quality to quantity. High wine prices, better growing practices, and greed pushed yields from twelve hl/ha in the early nineteenth century to eighteen hl/ha in mid-century. By 1850 so much wine was being produced at such low prices that one-third of it was distilled. The competition of cheap Russian wheat was an important factor in this unwise rush to economic overdependence on the vine in the period from the 1850s to the 1880s, when viticulture flourished in the Midi.