The Founder of Scientific Oenology?

In a preface to the last reprinting of Pasteur's Etudes sur le vin, Maurice Vallery-Radot declared that this classic work had formed generations of oenologists. Perhaps. But the work was reprinted only once, in 1924, after the second edition of 1873. Perhaps after having achieved paradigm status, Pasteur's book became the classic text of oenologists, at least after they invented themselves in the late nineteenth century. To see the greatness of Pasteur's oenology today is not easy without making a concerted effort to appreciate his revolutionary work in its nineteenth-century context. Of course, even old-fashioned worshipers of the contextless text can appreciate Pasteur's brilliant scientific papers. Much of his writing on wine is as worthy of admiration for its striking novelties, scientific style, cogent reasoning, and epistemological alertness as his great paper on lactic acid fermentation.

In post-malolactic and increasingly post-Pasteurian oenology there may be some doubt that Pasteur deserves ein Heldenleben. The panacea of pasteurization for wine diseases perhaps came to be more practiced in Burgundy than in Bordeaux, but it was in Bordeaux that one of Pasteur's most famous students, Ulysse Gayon, founded the oenology of fine wines. And that oenology does not include heating, in spite of Gayon's production of masterpieces of experimental theater showing that oenophiles could not tell the difference between the raw and the cooked. In malolactic fermentation, a specialty of Bordelais oenology, live bacteria assumed a non-Pasteurian beneficial role.