History of French Wine - From The Revolution To Phylloxera

From The Revolution To Phylloxera

Following the French Revolution there was an increase in the amount of poor quality French wine being produced. Jean-Antoine Chaptal, the Minister of the Interior for Napoleon, felt that a contributing factor to this trend was the lack of knowledge among many French vignerons of the emerging technologies and winemaking practices that could improve the quality their wines. In 1801, Chaptal compiled this knowledge into a treatise Traité théorique et pratique sur la culture de la vigne which included his advocacy of adding sugar to the wine to increase alcohol levels—a process now known as chaptalization. Chaptal's treatise was a turning point in the history of wine technology as it synthesized the knowledge current to the beginning of the 19th century.

By the mid 19th century, the wine industry of France enjoyed a golden period of prosperity. A new class of consumers, the bourgeoisie, emerged as a strong market for wine and other culinary products. The Gironde region of Bordeaux, in particular, enjoyed a swell of interest from both the Parisian market as well as its steady trade with England. For the 1855 Paris Exposition, Emperor Napoleon III commissioned the Bordeaux merchants to come out with a ranking of the region's wine estates. The 1855 classification of Bordeaux would become one of the world's most famous rankings of wine estates. Wine was becoming a cornerstone of the French economy and a source of national pride as French wine enjoyed international recognition as the benchmark standards for the wine world.

A series of events brought this golden age of prosperity to an end. In the 19th century, scientific interest in collecting botanical species lead to the exchange of many specimens from around the world—with the unintended consequence of introducing new diseases and aliments to populations that had no natural resistances to these diseases. North America, in particular, was the source of several grape ailments that would devastate the French wine industry. It started in the 1850s with the introduction of powdery mildew, or oidium, which not only affected the skin color of the grapes but also reduced vine yields and the resulting quality of the wines. The 1854 vintage was particularly hard hit, producing the smallest yields seen in more than 60 years. A solution to the problem was discovered in 1857 when Henri Marès devised a technique of sulfuring vines to combat oidium.

But just as French vignerons were recovering from oidium came a new mysterious ailment that caused decay or death in the grapevines. The cause was a tiny louse, known as phylloxera, imported from North America. This louse targets the rootstock of the vine. The solution to this epidemic also came from North America in the grafting of naturally resistant American rootstocks to the European vines. However, while the importing of this new North American plant material helped to stave off the phylloxera epidemic, it brought with it yet more problems-the fungal disease of downy mildew that first surfaced in 1878 and black rot that followed in the 1880s.

The devastation to French vineyards brought with it the opportunity to explore new plantings and many vignerons began to experiment with hybrid plantings—starting first with the American hybrids (such as Delaware and Clinton) with genes from the more resistant American vines species and then moving onto to French hybrids (such as Chambourcin and Vidal blanc) that produces wines with flavors more familiar to European Vitis vinifera.