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.

Because the phylloxera aphid destroyed the root system of the ungrafted vinifera vine, it was necessary to graft scions or the fruit-producing part of European vines onto pure American or hybrid Franco-American resistant rootstocks. At first it seemed that the replanting of a vineyard was a simple matter depending on time, labor, and capital. In reality, the reconstitution of the vineyards proved difficult because the rootstocks had to be able to survive in different soils, to be compatible with the varieties of vinifera vines to which they were grafted, and to be capable of giving the desired yield. So vines had to be crossed in various combinations. The crossings were the subject of a great experiment, or rather many experiments, big and small. In view of the time and expense required to complete these risky trials, the use of ungrafted, disease-resistant American vines or direct-production hybrids seemed an easy way out. But the wine from these vines was vastly inferior to that from straight viniferas and French vines grafted on American and hybrid rootstocks.

The grape vine has engaged in an orgy of multiplication of species since it came into existence many millions of years ago.

Emile Peynaud once remarked that the value of oenologists is a function of the quality of the regional wines in which they make some improvement. The reputation of the Bordeaux school of oenology certainly owes much to the fame of the wines of Bordeaux; it is also true that the quality of the grands vins owes much to the work of the school's oenologists since the middle of the nineteenth century, especially since the 1930s. Several years ago Pascal Ribéreau-Gayon, then director of the Institut d'oenologie (made a faculty in 1995) of the University of Bordeaux, observed that the grands crus of Bordeaux, far from being a gift from nature, are “the fruit of a discipline imposed by man upon nature”. Not that past generations had let nature pursue her wanton ways – to continue this Baconian metaphor – but winemaking was the result of centuries of practice resolutely based on empiricism. Ampelology and oenology brought improvements in the quality of wine that were based on the comforting certainties of experimental science. True, the cognitive basis for these scientific specialties already existed, but it was their institutionalization with an input into production that made the difference.

In all the provincial universities of the nineteenth century there was a strong connection between faculties of science and local economies. Chemists were often at the forefront in forging the connections.

After the Second World War, the new oenology led to striking and largely beneficial changes in the wine of Bordeaux. The research program there evolved as an institution for producing oenologists and has also developed a fruitful interaction with the Bordelais winemakers appropriate for the “world capital of wine”. Emile Peynaud, one of the key figures in the transformation, has noted the Bordelais conjoncture of research, teaching, and capitalistic production and consumption. The basic work of Jean Ribéreau-Gayon and Peynaud, spread through their texts and articles and through the educational machine, eventually was applied by winegrowers to production and, to some extent, by business to the handling of wine from producer to consumer. The role of the university in this transformation was consecrated by Ribéreau-Gayon's appointment in 1949 as head of the Bordeaux Station agronomique et oenologique. In Peynaud's opinion, Jean Ribéreau-Gayon presided over the birth of a new science. This interpretation flatters Peynaud by making him present at the creation, but one cannot deny that oenology was now firmly based on several scientific disciplines. It was directly affected by what happened in analytical chemistry, physical chemistry, plant physiology, biochemistry dealing with plants and with fermentations, and microbiology. Finally, oenology was solidly established in higher education. The long reign of Ribéreau-Gayon and Peynaud in oenology at Bordeaux had such significance for the region that when they retired in 1976 it was a departmental event, celebrated with all the sentimental pomp French ceremonial genius brings to such occasions.

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.

The champagne industry is one of the world's most successful and profitable enterprises, striking evidence of the marketability of distinction and carbon dioxide in drink. Annual production is about 200 million bottles, barely enough to satisfy a greedy elite, at least in times of prosperity. The rise of the champagne industry partly compensated for the economic and demographic decline of the Champagne in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the fall in prices for wheat and beet sugar, land was left fallow; in 1914 agricultural production was half what it had been around 1850. The area covered by vines dropped to 38,000 hectares because of phylloxera and competition from the Midi. In 1835 vines covered 18,495 ha of the Marne; by 1900–9 the figure was 14,860; and in the period 1920–49 the figure was always less than 9000 ha. By 1980–7, vines covered 19,214 ha. The amount of land covered by vines in the Marne has just more than doubled in the twentieth century, with production of wine having increased about fourfold.

The champagne trade came to be controlled by the négociants, whose power had its origins in the eighteenth century but grew strikingly in the nineteenth century with the rise in sales. One of the distinguishing features of the industry was the presence of the champagne widows (Bollinger, Clicquot, Laurent-Perrier, Pommery, and Roederer). In recent years financial groups have replaced many of the famous family houses, the “rois du Champagne.”

It is difficult to overestimate the economic and social importance of the vine in French history. In 1865 winemaking was one of France's flourishing industries, producing seventy million hl (hectoliters) of wine worth one and a half billion francs. Between 1882 and 1892 the annual value of all plant production fell from 9.149 to 7.865 billion francs. A large part of this drop in production was due to the general fall in prices during “the agricultural crisis”, part of the Great Depression of 1873-96. A wine industry weakened by vine diseases must also be taken into account.

Figures for Bordeaux indicate the damage done to wine production by several devastating diseases. Between 1840 and 1849 the average annual production of the vins du Bordelais was 1,646,000 hl; in the 1850s it dropped to 1,183,000 hl. By the early 1870s (1869-75), vats were overflowing, with an annual average production of between 2,500,000 and 3,000,000 hl. In 1875 over 5,000,000 hl were produced; this figure was not surpassed until 1900, when the production of nearly 5,750,000 hl of bordeaux established a record unbroken until 1922, a year producing over 7,000,000 hl. But between 1876 and 1885, phylloxera reduced production to an average annual figure of 1,774,000 hl. It was not until 1891 that production climbed back to nearly 2,500,000 hl, reaching nearly 5,000,000 hl in 1893 (for national figures see Figures ia and ib).

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.

It is tempting to see scientific winemaking today as being in a position similar to that of modern medicine: the prisoner of its own high-tech success, placed in a situation in which there are small increments of progress. In the case of winemaking, not all of this progress improves the wine or increases the drinker's pleasure. In the recent edition of his Wine Buyers Guide, Robert Parker scolds oenologists because they “rate security and stability over the consumer's goal of finding joy in wine”. It is not a bad thing that gurus of the oenophilic scene like Kermit Lynch, Robert Parker, and Matt Kramer denounce the abuse of high-tech winemaking aimed more at extending the shelf life of the product rather than at the gustatory qualities preferred by consumers, or at least by Lynch and Parker and their numerous followers. Still, it is highly unlikely that scientific viticulture and oenology are going to fade away any time soon, and much of the research has had a good effect on winemaking. Whether the results deserve praise or condemnation, it is a good idea to know what exactly we are talking about when we refer to oenological research. This final chapter will indicate its main directions.

The Hybridists Take on the Grafters and Big Science

From the viewpoint of winegrowers, the science of the Montpellier professors was not very useful because it failed to provide vital, precise, detailed information. Because Montpellier's professorial science had committed itself to giving practical advice to growers on the reconstitution of vineyards, the complaint is not so absurd as it might appear to later historians. Growers were eager to obtain reliable information about Franco- American hybrids (both grafted vines and direct producers) and new rootstocks that were superior to pure American roots in difficult chalky soils as well as new direct-production hybrids. These direct producers were becoming more and more popular with small as well as big producers because of their reputation for resistance to the devastating black rot disease that was seriously lowering grape production in the late 1880s. Many producers found that the traditional sources of information (viticultural congresses and societies, journals and newspapers, and even occupants of departmental chairs of agriculture) all failed to provide the complex knowledge required by French viticulture.

In the program he proclaimed in the first issue (1898) of the RHFA (Revue des hybrides franco-américains), Paul Gouy condemned the spokesmen of official science as poor purveyors of new scientific information. Most of the departmental chairs of agriculture and their institutions, either hostile to or suspicious of the new vines, were not inclined to advise growers to plant them, even on an experimental basis.

Eighteenth-Century Research Schemes for Improving Wine

The old pre-Chaptalian practical viticultural and oenological science had not been without its texts. The third section of the Théâtre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs (1600) by Olivier de Serres contained over a hundred pages of “science” and practice on vine and wine. Le nouveau théâtre d'agriculture et ménage des champs… (1713), by the Sieur Louis Liger contained five short chapters on the vine and winemaking. The substantial Mémoire sur la meilleure manière de faire et de gouverner les vins de Provence (1772) by the abbe Rozier summed up existing wisdom while criticizing traditional practices and calling for improvements, with an emphasis on cleanliness. In L'art de faire le vin (1772), Maupin also criticized the weight of tradition and ignorance in winemaking. Criticizing tradition was one of the literary devices of reformist works. Of course, authors were no less wrong in adopting this conventional strategy. Some traditions disappear, some are invented, and some undergo so many small modifications that they become a different species of tradition. Burgundian winemaking changed in its details as people's taste in wine altered over the centuries: different epochs, different versions of the same wine.

In the Enlightenment, science was part of the intellectual baggage of the professional classes and cultured men and women. Voltaire wrote on Newton and lesser minds studied the grape. Science is, among other things, an efficient system for ensuring the survival of ideas and practices.