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.

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.

Extent of the French Hybrid Empire

The continued spread of direct-production hybrids could not give complete satisfaction to their supporters without the intellectual pleasure of scientific approval of these vines. That approval was withheld, with the result that quarrels over direct producers in French viticulture did not end with the Congress of Lyon (1901) or even with the Congress of Angers (1907). In 1903 Gouy attacked Viala, who had just said bad things about hybrids in the Sicilian review Vitacoltura moderna: that no known hybrid had a high resistance to phylloxera and that the quality of hybrid grapes and their wine was low. The editor, Frederico Paulsen, had asked both Viala and Ravaz about growing direct-production hybrids in Sicily. Fortunately for the hybrid cause, the answers given by Ravaz were less negative and could be interpreted by Gouy as contradicting Viala's opinion. Ravaz's stock had risen in the hybrid camp since his apparent apostasy at the Congress of Lyon, much feted in hybrid circles. If scientific approval came at the expense of the Americanist cause, all the better for the hybrid cause.

A set of minor concessions by a leading spokesman of the Ecole de Montpellier did not mean that the official program of reconstitution of France's vineyards was greatly modified.

The first step in the commercialisation of your technology is one of self audit. Deciding what your ’endpoint‘ will be is crucial to the determination of the direction in which you move and the methods you take to get there. Any commercialisation will require time and effort and in the initial stages will mostly be your own. The apparently unproductive and ephemeral activities necessary to bring your technology to market will inevitably take you away from the bench and your beloved research. It is thus easy to resent the time spent in commercial exploitation, particularly if the latter is going neither well nor quickly nor if you feel out of your depth in dealing with people of a different mind set. This would perhaps be a mistake, since great satisfaction can be derived from devolving the benefits of your research. Indeed, some would see the effective transfer of research into society as a necessary and integral part of the research process.

This book is aimed at helping researchers to understand the commercial potential of their technology. It will help to bridge the communication gap and familiarise the reader with the plethora of functions, skills and processes that commercialisation requires. It will not be a substitute for the professional advice of patent agents, solicitors, marketing executives, etc., but will go some way to helping you to understand what they require.

The biotechnology business environment

The biotechnology industry is now entering a renaissance, as the initial excesses of expectation evaporate and many start-up companies begin their journeys with more experienced management and better directed investment criteria. Hopefully this will lead to fewer mistakes in the market place. The science associated with biotechnology is burgeoning outwards at a considerable rate, and we can reasonably expect the number of licensing deals and the preponderance of startup companies to increase. The change in UK government policy to both encourage and expedite the transfer of technology from our research base will help create a positive environment for biotechnology, thus allowing these opportunities to assume their rightful place as a significant contributor to national wealth and prosperity. If this text has given you an insight into these processes, removed some of the mystique of the commercial world and helped facilitate the transfer of your technology into the market place, then it will have succeeded in its purpose.

Perhaps more so than in any other industry, research is the lifeblood of biotechnology. The basic research breakthroughs of the late 1970s and early 1980s have opened an unprecedented Pandora's box of opportunity, procedures and applications that were once in the realm of fantasy, but are now with us.

Decide what you want and know where you are going

In bringing your research to market it is crucial to know what you want, to decide where you are going and where you wish to be. That is, develop a firm, flexible, strategic plan. So what do you want? Some options are: (a) to make yourself so rich that you never have to work again; (b) to have a career change; (c) to have other related commercial interests; (d) to have a lively interest in seeing your work developed further and used for the benefit of society; or (e) to make money for your institute. No doubt there are other possibilities. Your chances of reaching your goal will be dependent on the technology and its exploitation. If you have a technology that is only suitable for licensing then you can expect a percentage of the fee (depending upon your arrangement with your institute) and/or of the royalties. The more you can segment the potential market for the technology or the more generic it is, the more likely that you will sell additional licences. Perhaps the best example of this is the Stanford licence for genetic engineering (genetic manipulation using plasmids), but this is a precedent that is unlikely to be repeated often. Licences will: (a) generate revenue; (b) be a useful publicity aid to increase the profile of your institute; and (c) will help form collaborations with industry.

Introduction

This chapter will consider the issues of developing your technology further. This will involve marketing yourself and your product to potential licensees, financiers and/or technology transfer companies should you choose to use one. It will involve looking at how to find potential licensees, how to segment the market and what information is publicly available to you. The next section will look at the options for commercialisation and how to choose between them.

Consultancy and contract research

The ‘top end’ of the technology transfer business and therefore also that of taking your research to market are the business start up and licensing deals. There are however, two other areas whereby commercial links can provide revenue and more importantly, can begin to form effective relationships. These lie in the areas of: (a) contract research, whereby industry sponsors a definite piece of work for a given period of time, using given resources and with an expectation of a defined end result; and (b) the general marketing of consultancy services. The latter involves the wide range of academic expertise in the university that can be sold to the benefit of all sectors of industry. In marketing yourself and your technology, you should not be quick to discount these avenues.