Life
Schlumberger was born in Stuttgart in the German Kingdom of Württemberg. Upon the early death of his father, he began a commercial apprenticeship. As director of Ruinart, one of the leading champagne houses in Reims, France, he was experienced with the méthode champenoise when he on a 1841 boat trip met his future wife Sophie Kirchner from Vienna, the daughter of a wealthy factory owner. He had the idea to produce champagne-like wine (Schaumwein) in Austria using the French method but Austrian grapes.
In 1842 Schlumberger founded his company renting several vineyards in Vöslau, a small Lower Austrian town south of Vienna situated in the present-day Thermenregion wine-growing area of the eastern Vienna Woods. His alliance which Sophie Kirchner, whom he married in the following year, helped him finance his business venture. Schlumberger presented his first sparkling wine in 1846 under the name Vöslauer weißer Schaumwein (White sparkling wine of Vöslau), from 1859 under Vöslauer Goldeck, the first protected wine trademark in Austria. It was produced from red Blauer Portugieser grapes growing in the Goldeck vineyards in Vöslau, which Schlumberger bought in 1843, and the sparkling wine was an immediate success.
Schlumberger wines were on board of the SMS Novara on its around-the-world mission 1857-59. The company opened branch stores in Berlin and after the 1862 International Exhibition also in London, where the wine was sold under the brand name "Vöslauer Sparkling". Robert Schlumberger also served as Vöslau mayor from 1864 to 1870. In 1878, one year before his death, he was ennobled by Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria as "Edler von Goldeck". He died in Vöslau, aged 64.
Read more about this topic: Robert Schlumberger Von Goldeck
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon, too soon—before life itself.”
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“One might feel that, at my age, I should look on life with more gravity. After all, I’ve been privileged to listen, firsthand, to some of the most profound thinkers of my day ... who were all beset by gloom over the condition the world had gotten into. Then why can’t I view it with anything but amusement?”
—Anita Loos (1894–1981)
“And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”
—Bible: Hebrew Exodus 21:23.