Wine

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Wine

In medieval times wine had been one of the most important items of European trade. Geographically restricted in its production, and yet demanded by the urban elites of northern Europe, wine barrels filled the holds of countless ships that plied their trade between the vineyards of western and southern Europe and the markets in the north of the continent. However, by the midfifteenth century this world was on the eve of dramatic change. The explosion of energy that led to European colonization of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, combined with the fundamental economic changes that took place in the seventeenth century, led not only to the opening up of new trade routes, but also to the production of entirely new kinds of wine. Grapes, if they are to be used successfully in wine making, generally need to be grown in areas where the annual isotherm lies between 10° and 20°C, equating approximately to land lying between 30 and 50 degrees north and south of the equator. Wherever European peoples encountered places with such climates, they invariably began cultivating grapes and turning them into wine. Such production, at least in the early days, did not suffice the demands of the emerging colonies, and this therefore generated substantial flows of wine from the "old world" to the "new," as well as the development of production in new areas such as the Atlantic islands destined for the Americas.

OIDIUM AND PHYLLOXERA

During the nineteenth century the French wine industry was devastated by the introduction of foreign fungi and insects. In 1850 the vineyards were widely infected by a powdery mildew known as oidium that severely tainted grape quality. Even greater destruction followed with the outbreak of phylloxera,a small insect that feeds on the roots of the grapevine. It first appeared in the Rhône Valley (1860) and then spread like a plague across a vast portion of Europe's vineyards over the next few decades, crippling wine production.

It is estimated that phylloxera caused approximately $2 billion in damage to Europe's wine industry, according to M. Lalande, president of the chamber of commerce of Bordeaux. The wine industry struggled for several years to determine where these outbreaks originated and to develop an answer to the problem. It was discovered that both oidium and phylloxera arrived in Europe from North American rooted vines that had been imported for experimentation by wine-makers. Eventually, oidium was controlled by spraying sulfur on the vineyards, and phylloxera was combated by grafting American rootstocks onto European vines to create a resistant hybrid strand.

Ryan Peacock

"NEW WORLD," NEW WINES

European soldiers, missionaries, and settlers found wild vines when they arrived in the Americas, and yet the grapes had not been used previously by the indigenous inhabitants to make wine. It was thus the extension of European cultural influences, including a taste for wine not only as an element of religious symbolism but also as an enjoyable sensual experience, that led to the rapid expansion of viticulture and the wine trade in the seventeenth century. By the 1520s wine was being made in what became Mexico; the 1530s saw vine cultivation and wine making spreading south into Peru, reaching Chile by the 1550s. To the north, vines were cultivated in Florida in the 1560s, and experiments to establish viticulture in the new British colonies such as Virginia had begun by the start of the seventeenth century. Economic factors soon came to the fore in helping the industry develop in Latin America during the seventeenth century, when the costs of transporting European wine to the west coast of the American continent, and the damage that occurred to barrels on the way, made this a hazardous enterprise.

Grape growing and wine making and trade followed European conquerors across the world's oceans. By the middle of the seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company had established a successful enterprise in the Cape Colony. With the arrival of distillation there in 1672 it was possible to turn much of the area's poor wine into brandy, which had the distinct advantage that it was much cheaper than wine to transport per volume of alcohol. Hence, a successful export-led trade emerged with Cape brandies, as well as a few high-quality wines, shipped back to Europe beginning in the eighteenth century. The English established their first vineyard in Australia in 1788, but it was not until the nineteenth century that viticulture and wine making became firmly established there, as indeed was also the case in New Zealand and California. Until then, these territories had to rely largely on supplies of wine from Europe to fulfill demand for the beverage.

INVESTMENT IN CAPITAL: INDIVIDUALISM IN THE EUROPEAN HEARTLAND

Alongside the global spread of viticulture, important changes were also taking place in wine production and trade in Europe. The ebb and flow of the medieval wine trade had been driven by the fact that wine rapidly deteriorates when it comes into contact with air. It was only when glass bottles stoppered with corks began to be used during the latter part of the seventeenth century that a lasting solution to this problem was realized. Together with more careful selection of grapes for particular wines and enhancements in the methods of vinification during the seventeenth century, notably through improved cellar hygiene, enhanced fining and later use of the barrels, these technological changes led to the emergence of entirely new styles of wine, particularly the so-called New French Clarets from Bordeaux and the sparkling wines of Champagne. Wine producers had begun to realize that by investing in the production process, they were able to reap larger profits. But this potential profit was only made possible by the existence of a new kind of market and, thus, trade. The continent's social and political leaders set themselves apart from the masses by using new social symbols and distinctive kinds of behavior. With the general rise in alcohol consumption across Europe, it was to these new wines that the elite turned as one of their main means of social distinction. While some regions began to specialize in quality wine production, merchants began to turn elsewhere to furnish the burgeoning demand for the cheap, low-quality wines traded across urban Europe. The key agents of this change were the provincial wine brokers, particularly in France, who from a position of relative insignificance in the seventeenth century came to exercise widespread control over the wine trade by 1800. In southern Europe supplies still came largely from the immediate vicinity of towns, but increasingly the urban markets of northern Europe were fueled with wines from further afield.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY CRISIS AND CHANGE

By the middle of the nineteenth century European viti-culture was in crisis. Increased contacts with the Americas had led to the introduction of fungi and insects from across the Atlantic, notably oïdium (powdery mildew) and phylloxera (an aphid whose only host is the vine), against which European vine species had little natural resistance. These were to have a devastating impact on the continent's wine trade. In France, for example, total wine production fell from some 84.5 million hectoliters in 1875 to a low of 23.4 million in 1889. After years of debate and much experimentation, the solution to the phylloxera infestation was found to be grafting European Vitis vinifera vines onto resistant rootstocks of American vines. The adulteration of wines resulting from the collapse of the industry was one of the key factors that led to the emergence of controlled appellation systems in Europe during the early twentieth century.

DEMOCRATIZATION AND INTERNATIONALIZATION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The second half of the twentieth century saw another fundamental shift in the wine trade, as supermarkets took over a dominant position in the European marketplace. Consumption in the traditional wine-consuming countries, notably France, Spain, and Italy, plummeted, and the north European supermarket buyers, ever on the lookout for cheaper wines, began to scour the world for new sources of supply. In the 1970s and early 1980s they turned to the cheap wines of eastern Europe, but from the early 1990s the technical innovations in grape growing and wine making that enabled wines of good quality to be produced at reasonable prices in other parts of the world, most notably in Australia, began to transform the world's wine trade. By the end of the 1990s competitively priced wines from Chile, South Africa, and Argentina also had begun to make serious inroads into the global market. At the start of the twenty-first century, though, France, Italy, and Spain still dominate global production, making some 54 percent of the world's wine; they also continue to account for about 67 percent of total wine exports. The contemporary world wine market is nevertheless now much more internationalized and competitive than it was a mere twenty-five years ago.

SEE ALSO Agriculture; Australia and New Zealand; Climate; Disease and Pestilence; Famine; France;Peru;Porto;Portugal;Spain.