Wine

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WINE

wine in 1789
the nineteenth century
temperance
phylloxera
recovery after phylloxera
bibliography

Wine was one of the principal alcoholic beverages consumed in Europe during the long nineteenth century. Beer and wine had already been staple elements in the daily diet throughout Europe for centuries because they were safer to drink than the available water, which was often contaminated by human, animal, and industrial waste.

Several themes bear on the history of wine between 1789 and 1914. They include changes in production and consumption patterns, the effects of the temperance movements and phylloxera, and shifts in the cultural status of wine.

wine in 1789

At the end of the eighteenth century, wine was consumed by common people in areas where viticulture flourished, and where wine was inexpensive because it did not have to be transported to market or could be produced on a local or domestic scale. Thus, wine consumption was widespread in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, and Greece, and those regions of central and eastern Europe where grapes were cultivated.

Elsewhere, beer, ale, and distilled spirits were more commonly consumed, but because wine had a social cachet, it was imported for consumption by those who could afford it. The middle and upper classes in northern Europe also consumed beer and spirits, but wine was a socially valued beverage and wine merchants did brisk business in England, the Netherlands and Belgium, Scandinavia, and Russia.

The English market, for example, soaked up huge volumes of wine from Bordeaux and Port (wine fortified with brandy) from Portugal. A 1793 guide to St. Petersburg noted that wealthy people there drank wines from Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne, and also Hungarian wines that were also popular because they are "strong, very alcoholic, and warm the blood" (Phillips, p. 202). Even where wine was available locally, as in northern Italy, wine was imported from France because it was reputed to be of higher quality.

It is impossible to provide useful figures on per capita consumption because total production is often unknown and drinking patterns are unclear. Enough wine was brought into Paris in the 1780s to enable each inhabitant—women, children, and men—to consume between three and six liters of wine a week. But adult men clearly drank more than women and children, and some tavern records suggest that men might have downed two liters of wine a day.

Although contemporary commentators condemned drunkenness, they accepted wine as a basic part of the daily diet. The political scientist Jean-Baptiste Moheau wrote in the 1780s that wine is "an excellent beverage for the poor, not only because it is a food but also because it is very good protection against physical decay" (Phillips, p. 203).

The popularity of wine in eighteenth-century France led to complaints that high taxes on it led to clandestine wine-shops and smuggling. Wine was regularly smuggled into Paris—sometimes through channels bored through the city walls—and taverns selling less expensive wine outside the walls (where the city tax was not levied) did a roaring trade on holidays.

In response to complaints about sales taxes, the Revolutionary government abolished the tax on wine in 1791 and, at midnight on 1 May, a convoy of hundreds of carts brought an estimated 2 million liters of wine into Paris for sale at the new, tax-free price. Even when a tax was re-imposed in 1798, wine was still cheaper than it had been before the Revolution.

the nineteenth century

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods promoted the wine industry in France, and annual production rose by a third between the late 1780s and the period from 1805 to 1812. The area under viticulture increased, especially in southern France, and governments subsidized the wine industry by purchasing vast volumes of wine for military rations and hospitals during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815).

During the nineteenth century, several developments favored the spread of wine consumption throughout Europe. One was an improvement in transportation brought about by railroads from the 1850s onward. Until then, the cheapest means of moving wine was by water (river or coastal shipping), but trains could carry bulk wine inexpensively, and the railroad extended the market reach of wine regions. From the 1860s, the wines of southern France (especially Languedoc) began to penetrate the large working-class markets in Paris and France's northern industrial cities.

There were also developments in elite wines, and regions like Bordeaux consolidated their reputations for producing premium wines. In 1855, at the request of Napoleon III, the seventy-nine most expensive wines from some of Bordeaux's most prestigious districts were classified into five categories (known as Crus or "Growths"). In the same period, in the Italian region of Tuscany, Baron Ricasoli set out the approved grape varieties for modern Chianti.

During the nineteenth century, too, modern Champagne was born. In the 1820s Veuve Clicquot introduced new techniques of production that were widely adopted and became known as the "Champagne Method," while in mid-century Champagne began to move from the sweet sparkling wine it had been, to the drier styles now most common.

temperance

While the European wine industry was growing, expanding its markets and developing expensive, premium wines, two threats emerged. The first was an unprecedented movement against the consumption of any more alcohol than was needed for basic dietary purposes. This temperance movement was a coordinated expression of the concern that had been articulated sporadically for centuries, as civic and church commentators warned against the social and personal consequences of excessive drinking. By the end of the nineteenth century, some temperance movements began to call for total abstinence and a ban on the production of beverage alcohol.

Anti-alcohol movements like these attracted less support in Europe, especially Continental Europe, than in North America and Australasia. In Europe, wine and beer were entrenched in diet and culture. And to the extent that sources of potable water needed to be available before alcohol could be removed from the diet, much of Europe lagged behind other parts of the Western world.

Although the anti-alcohol campaigns made some inroads in England, they were largely ineffective in continental Europe. In France, a number of temperance organizations focused their campaigns solely on spirits and went so far as to encourage wine-drinking on the ground that wine was healthy and an antidote to alcoholism.

A side effect of the anti-alcohol campaigns was a decline in the reputation of wine as having therapeutic qualities. For centuries wine had been prescribed for digestive and other problems, and it was believed to have general tonic effects. In 1870–1871, one hospital in Darmstadt, Germany, went through 4,633 bottles of white and 6,332 bottles of red wine from the Rhine region, sixty bottles of Champagne, a few dozen bottles of superior white and red Bordeaux, and about thirty dozen bottles of Port.

Yet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new drugs and painkillers (like aspirin), sedatives, and tranquilizers came onto the market. They were clinically tested and promised specific results, unlike wine, which was promoted as merely beneficial in a general sense.

phylloxera

The decline of wine as medicine had a long-term effect. A more serious and immediate threat to wine in nineteenth-century Europe was phylloxera, a vine-disease imported from North America that took hold in southern France in the 1860s and, during the following decades, devastated vineyards throughout almost the whole of Europe. For years—the timing varied from region to region—wine production fell and many consumers shifted to other beverages.

The phylloxera epidemic was a short-term blow to Europe's wine industry (a solution was put in place from the 1870s), but it had far-reaching effects. For one thing, it changed the map of European viticulture. In France, many marginal vineyards in the north were not replanted and the center of gravity shifted south, as the vineyards of Languedoc-Roussillon (now with rail access to northern markets) expanded dramatically.

All Europe's wine industries were affected by phylloxera. Spanish wine benefited at first, as an influx of French winemakers left their dying vines in regions like Bordeaux and began to work in Spanish regions such as Rioja. But then, Spain's vines died in turn. Italy's wine-producers experienced a short sales boom as the French imported wine to make up their own shortfall. But phylloxera soon spread to Italy's vineyards, too.

When phylloxera reduced the wine supply, counterfeit and substitute wines (some made from raisins, others adulterated with all kinds of additives) flooded the European market. They damaged the reputation of established regions and led wine consumers to shift to beer and spirits, such as Scotch whisky in England and absinthe in France.

recovery after phylloxera

In an effort to recover its markets, the French wine industry enacted rules that became a model for wine laws in many countries in the twentieth century. The rules restricted the ingredients in wine and specified (for the first time) that it had to be made from fresh grapes. At the turn of the century, the French parliament declared wine to be a safe and healthy beverage.

France also adopted Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée laws to regulate the use of geographical names on wines. From 1908, wines could not be labeled "Champagne" unless they were made from grapes grown there. These laws were extended to other regions in the twentieth century and became the basis for wine laws throughout Europe.

Developments in France through much of the nineteenth century are so important not only because French wine was reputed to be the best in the world (winemakers came to France from across Europe and around the world to learn techniques), but also because France made more wine than any other country. In 1828, French wine production accounted for 40 percent of world output and France's 2 million hectares of land under vines was far greater than Italy's 400,000 hectares, Austria's 625,000, and Hungary's 550,000.

France was also the site of many of the technical advances in winemaking in the nineteenth century. The great French scientist Louis Pasteur devoted much of his time to research on wine, especially to understanding the process of fermentation. Ironically, the process of heating liquids to kill off bacteria (pasteurization) was used to produce unfermented grape juice that many temperance campaigners argued should replace wine in the Christian communion.

Despite the phylloxera episode and the efforts of anti-alcohol movements, wine retained its popularity among Europeans whether they drank cheap, ordinary wine or could afford the prestigious brands. Even when regular supplies of reliable fresh water became available, and even when the medical properties of wine were called into question, consumption rates remained high in many parts of Europe, especially Italy, Spain, and France.

Nonetheless, by 1900, production outpaced demand in some regions, prices fell, and some industries faced a crisis. In several French regions, producers and workers in wine-related jobs demonstrated in large numbers. Protests attracted 300,000 in Ni?mes and 600,000 in Montpellier in 1907. In 1911, workers in Champagne destroyed hundreds of thousands of liters of Champagne during disturbances.

The outbreak of war in 1914 came to the aid of the French wine industry. Although the call-up of troops in August left wineries short-handed for what would prove a bumper harvest, the grapes were picked by older men, women, and children. The wineries of Languedoc donated 20 million liters to military hospitals, and soon the government was buying vast amounts of wine for soldiers' rations. The military wine ration was increased steadily as the war dragged on, and in 1917 French troops at the front consumed 1.2 billion liters of wine.

The long nineteenth century was bracketed by political upheavals that, in the short term at least, were good for the wine industry. In the one hundred years between, the industry and the status of wine in material, cultural, and medical terms went through a series of transformations that set the stage for wine's playing a different role in twentieth-century European society and culture.