::

:: FRANZ RITTER VON HEINTL ::

:: Der Weinbau des österreichischen Kaiserthums, Vienna, 1821-1835 ::

:: This is a seriously weird, and in its serious way, weirdly inspired meditation on fermentation. Perhaps it belongs more in an anthology of (Austrian-) German Romantic prose rhapsodies than in a collection of texts on wine-making; but then, fermentation tends to have this unsettling effect on those who meditate upon it, which I fully understand, being one who does so every year.
:: I'm sorry to say I haven't had the time to do any research on the author, and can't imagine what effort it would take to produce an English translation worthy of the original. In the meanwhile, I've thought it would be better to post the text for whomever can make use of it, rather than delay until my annotations & inquiries can complete their own fermentations.
:: In any case, the author was Franz Ritter von Heintl, an Austrian aristocrat with estates in Nering, Raspach, and Würnitz; his book is entitled, Der Weinbau des österreichischen Kaiserthums, and was published, at the expense of the author, in two volumes, the first in Vienna in 1821, the second in Vienna in 1835. Schoene (4099) records only two copies in German or Austrian libraries, one in the Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen, one in the Bibliothek des Staatlichen Weinbauinstituts Freiburg i. Br. I don't know of any in the United States, although mine came from Gustave Niebaum's library at Inglenook, so there may well be others.
:: The excerpt which follows is from Volume II, and is presented here as it is in the original, except that I haven't used a Fraktur typeface for the transcription, since I couldn't see any particular point in doing so.
:: I hope someone out there enjoys this as much as I do. ::

TO THE TEXT

::

:: THE HERMITAGE ANTHOLOGY ::

:: A selection of rare 19th-century texts on wine-making at Hermitage, 1827-1868 ::

:: The vineyard of Hermitage is generally conceded to be one of the oldest in France. It has been under vines, and wines have been made from its grapes, for at least 2000 years. Thus one wonders, as one so often does in contemplating the history of wine-making, why it took so long for anyone to say much of anything about it.
:: But it did.
:: In fact, it took until the early nineteenth century for the earliest useful documents about winemaking at Hermitage to emerge, and even these generally are unknown, even to most specialists; which is why I'm presenting a selection from them here. There's little doubt that these selections will be of interest almost exclusively to those - such as wine-makers and historians - concerned with details of winemaking, and may be of little interest to most even of these. But one has to start somewhere; and at least if the texts are put out there where they could be read, someone could read them; which is the general point & hope of this entire library.
:: The first text is from J.A. Cavoleau's Oenologie Française, ou statistique de tous les vignobles et de toutes les boissons vineuses et spiriteuses de la France...par M. Cavoleau, Membre de la Société royale et centrale d'Agriculture, de la Société Philomatique de Paris, de la Société académique du département de la Loire-Inférieure, published in Paris in 1827. The book is far more interesting than the title would imply, and is in fact an extremely useful and detailed review of regional winemaking practices in all parts of France, including many that simply disappeared with the advent of phylloxera, never to return. Among the many surprises he has in store for most modern readers, are these:
1. That 80% of the red wine production of Hermitage is bought by the Bordeaux wine trade [where, of course, it was blended into their own grands crus.]
2. That he believes, "While taste may prefer other wines to red Hermitage, the white is certainly the finest that there is in France"; and that the entire production of true white Hermitage never exceeds a total of less than 1600 cases per year.
3. That the white lasts far longer than the red: "at least a century", and, no, he is not talking about Hermitage blanc vin de paille.
4. That the "Ermitage-paille", which he discusses separately, is in and of itself "without argument the finest white vin de liqueur."
5. That "Crose blanc" is entirely different from Hermitage blanc, since it is produced from a different grape, which he does not specify, and is a sparkling wine. [he notes otherwise that Hermitage blanc is the product "de la petite et de la grosse roussanne."]
:: The second text is at least equally interesting, but essentially unknown in connection with Hermitage. It is, M.-A Puvis, De la Culture de la Vigne, et de la Fabrication du Vin. Paris, 1848. About M. Puvis, I know next to nothing; except that he was an active grape-grower and wine-maker in the west of France, although I don't know where. His book is a general text on grape culture and wine-making; but, as part of his attendance at a Congrès des vignerons at Lyon, he joined a commission sent to investigate current practices at Hermitage; I have transcribed his report in its entirety. And among his surprises:
1. That red Hermitage is destemmed 100%, fermented in open tanks where the cap is punched down two or three times per day, and left on the skins for up to six weeks; this in an era when, in Burgundy for example, 48 hours on the skins was considered more than sufficient in a decent year.
2. That the best red Hermitage is kept in barrel seven to eight years before being bottled, and the white still longer.
:: The third text is from Victor Rendu, Ampélographie Française. Comprenant la Statistique, la Description des meilleurs Cépages, l'Analyse Chimique du Sol, et le Procédés de Culture et de Vinification des principaux Vignobles de France. Paris, 1857. Rendu (1809-72) was an inspector-general of agriculture; the objective of his book was very much the same as Cavoleau's, but 30 years later, and the result is equally interesting. Of course he has his own surprises for us, among which is the fact that Hermitage is aged in new barrels, not used, and that they are small (ca. 210 liters), not large. He has the red left in these barrels for 4 years before bottling, 5 years for the whites.
:: The fourth text is easily the most important, since it is the first monograph ever published on winemaking at Hermitage, and it is the most complete, professional (with respect to wine-making), and detailed of the excerpts presented here. It is, Monographie du coteau de l'Ermitage et des vignobles qui l'avoisinent, par M. Rey; in, La Bourgogne. Revue oenologique et viticole. Troisième Année. Dijon, 1861; pp. 585-602. Among, of course, dozens of other interesting details, he more or less agrees with his predecessors in noting:
1. That red Hermitage is destemmed 100%, the cap punched down several times a day, and left on the skins for something like a month; he is quite specific in asserting the advantages of an extended maceration.
2. That Hermitage is never aged in used cooperage, only in new barrels of 206-212 litres. Prior to use, these are simply rinsed with a decoction of hot water, peach leaves, and salt, flushed with cool water, then given a final splash of eau-de-vie before being filled.
3. That red Hermitage should be in barrels 4-5 years before bottling, white Hermitage, 5-6 years.
:: The fifth text is from Étude des Vignobles de France pour servir à l'enseignement mutuel de la viticulture et de la vinification françaises par le Dr. Jules Guyot | Tome II | Régions du Centre-Sud, de l'Est et de l'Ouest. Paris, 1868. The formidable Dr. Guyot's masterwork, this three-volume set is indeed an invaluable and exhaustively detailed survey of vineyard and winemaking practice in every region of France, just before the onslaught of phylloxera. His notes on Hermitage are not greatly different from the previous excerpts; although he's particularly amusing on the subject of new oak: "at Tain, they've noted a great difference in favor of new wines put in new barrels, as opposed to those put in used cooperage, no matter what care is taken in rinsing and sulfuring the latter. This is a very accurate and important observation: twenty wine-growing départements of France would have very honest and clean wines, if these wines were put in new vessels; put in permanent barrels, they pass for having a goût de terroir that is, in fact, nothing more than the taste of old cooperage. "

:: There are many reasons for reading works such as these, but the most important, I think, is to preserve an open mind.
:: For example, I've emphasized that Hermitage was particularly noteworthy for the use of small new oak cooperage, precisely because this is the opposite of what most Syrah specialists now think. Or more irritatingly, all too often don't so much think as believe, with all the evangelical fervor of converts to revealed gospel truth, wherein new cooperage becomes not simply a spice one may or may not choose to use, but the ventricles of Beelzebub, the end of authenticity, the death of typicity, the violation of terroir, and so forth and so on; a holy war nearly always justified as a return to old ways and the Wisdom of the Ancients. One might wish that a question of preference for one taste over another could be discussed without so much Blood, Soil, and Identity to begin with, and one may wonder what it is about wine as a symbol that so quickly slides off into this dark and stormy turf.
:: But at least, before founding a religion on the Ancients, one might want to read what they have to say. ::

TO THE TEXT

::

:: "M. Paguierre, ancien courtier de vins" ::

:: Manner of Making the Wine / Manière de Faire le Vin / 1828 / 1829 ::

:: This little text, or pair of texts, is rare, and intriguing for a number of reasons. The first is that there is no earlier publication known to me that describes wine-making in Bordeaux in comparable detail. The second, is that the wine-making it describes is so startlingly different, in several key respects, from anything we would now think of as traditional for that region.
:: The text appeared first in an English-language edition, published simultaneously in Edinburgh and London under the following title: Classification and Description of the Wines of Bordeaux. To which are prefixed, notices of the history and culture of the vine, process of making wine, &c. By M. Paguierre, ancien courtier de vin. William Blackwood, Edinburgh: and T. Cadell, London. MDCCCXXVIII. This was followed by a French edition of the identical text in 1829, which has permitted me to present the following selections in both French and English, in parallel columns. The publisher's preface to the British edition explains as follows:

::

ADVERTISEMENT.

A friend of the Editor being in Bordeaux, during a part of the year 1825 and 1826, happened to see, in the hands of M. Paguierre, a retired Wine-Broker, a well digested set of memoranda, on the subject of the Wine Trade. It appeared to him, that this was a sort of information much required in this country, and he therefore suggested to M. Paguierre, to add to the memoranda in his Carnet a preliminary chapter on the culture, the preparation, and the management of Bordeaux wines, and to send the whole to this country for publication. The result is now offered to the Public nearly in the words of M. Paguierre, who himself superintended the translation in Bordeaux; the Editor hopes this will account for some errors in idiom which have been allowed to remain. An Appendix has been added, containing information which has been obtained from other sources. Edinburgh, 1st March, 1828.

::

:: A similar preface appears in the French edition, with a subsequent note which presents the entire French edition of the book as being a translation of the English one, as clearly it is not; the two have simply been brought into agreement with each other. Equally clearly, the English edition is a translation from a French-language original, to the point of being pretty consistently amusing: for example, the better grade of Bordeaux wine is distinguished by "giving a gentle heat to the stomach, and not getting too quickly into the head", while the importance of experience in tasting it is "to avoid carefully the embarrassing oneself with such as have been mixed or brewed together, either to heighten or diminish the price"; and so on. Since the editor comments in his (English) introduction on these "errors in idiom which have been allowed to remain", it gives support to the image of a slightly cranky but quite authentic Paguierre, who is exactly as he is described as being, a retired Bordelais courtier de vin, perhaps, like Brillat-Savarin, a stickler for some fantasy of English style entirely of his own invention.
:: So, all told, I'm inclined to accept the book as being what it says it is, which matters only because it mentions some startling procedures: perhaps the most striking of these is the "mère-cuve", which he describes as being critically important, particularly for the first growths. This consists of a separate fermentation tank into which, after triage, only the very best grapes are put, destemmed but uncrushed, in layers 15 to 20 inches deep; two gallons (!) or so of old Cognac or Armagnac are then sprinkled on top; another layer of grapes is added, more brandy is added; and so on until the tank is full, whereupon another 2-4 gallons of strong eau-de-vie is added; the tank is then sealed, and allowed to ferment undisturbed for three weeks to one month. (The remainder of the vintage is crushed but is not destemmed, and allowed to ferment in a normal manner for 8-12 days.)
:: Not that there's anything irrational about such a "mère-cuve", assuming some very good friends in the distilled spirits trade; the brandy would of course raise the alcohol of the finished wine, and adding alcohol at the beginning, rather than acquiring it by the fermentation of added sugar, would, in an indigenous-yeast fermentation, possibly even help discourage apiculate spoilage yeast such as Kloeckera, which generally are much less tolerant to alcohol than Saccharomyces. However, and be all this as it may, the point is, I've never heard the process described elsewhere.
:: But enough comment. By any standard, M. Paguierre, whoever he may have been, has much else of interest to say, and quite clearly, I think, he's one who'd rather say it himself.::

TO THE TEXT

::

:: Ferment ::

:: An anthology of early texts crucial to the birth of microbiology ::

:: Charles Cagniard-Latour (1777-1859): Mémoire sur la Fermentation vineuse. 1837(1838).
:: Thénard, Becquerel, Turpin: Rapport sur des observations et des expériences faites sur la cause et les effets de la fermentation vineuse; par M. Cagniard-Latour. (1838).
:: Pierre J.F. Turpin (1775-1840): Mémoire sur la cause et les effets de la fermentation alcoolique et acéteuse. Lu à l'Académie en sa séance de 20 août 1838. 1838(1840).
:: Jean-Jacques Colin (1784-1865): Nouveau Mémoire sur la Fermentation. (ca. 1837).
:: Louis Pasteur (1822-1895): Mémoire sur la fermentation appelée lactique. (1857); and, Mémoire sur la fermentation alcoolique (1857).
[along with]
:: Turpin's drawing of microbial life as he saw it under his microscope at the Grande Brasserie du Luxembourg, that long night in October, 1837.

:: Certain understandings are so clearly the product of a difficult and highly specialized intellectual evolution, and so clearly remote from any probable intuition of daily experience, that their late arrival as accepted truths is in no way surprising.
:: For example, quantum mechanics.
:: Others seem very much the reverse. One tries to imagine what could have been thought before, and why it took so long to get it right.
:: For example, fermentation.
:: And, since until fermentation was understood to be microbial in nature, neither was human disease, this is hardly an historical detail of interest only to wine-makers.
:: Nor is it a purely "modern" intuition that fermentation is important: to trace the history of that concept from the transformational wine-gods of antiquity - including Christ - just until Pasteur, would be a long but fascinating book. Certainly by the mid-17th century, fermentation was widely seen as the archetype of transformational process in general, with specific analogies drawn between the fermentation of wine and the "fermentations" of disease in the human body (e.g., Pascal, 1681, and Moreau, 1685, excerpts from both of which are posted earlier on this site). And, by that same time, beer yeast had already been examined microscopically and described (Leeuwenhoek, De fermento cerevisiæ, 1680).
:: So one wonders why the dots were not connected a bit earlier; but the fact is that nearly 200 years later, Pasteur still had to win a major and prolonged scientific battle before it would be generally conceded that microbial life exists, and that both fermentation and disease are the products of its activity.
:: Since he deserves, and receives, all possible credit for having won that battle, it doesn't detract from his accomplishment to note that he was by no means the first to demonstrate convincingly that fermentation is the result of living micro-organisms; he was simply the first to force the opponents of that thought to stand down and admit defeat.
:: On June 12, 1837, twenty years before Pasteur's first paper on the subject was presented to the Académie des Sciences in Paris, Charles Cagniard-Latour presented a paper before that same institution. It was entitled, Mémoire sur la Fermentation vineuse. Since it is now known only from footnotes in specialist histories, and appears seldom to have been read even then, I have transcribed it in its entirety below. Three distinguished members of the Académie - Thénard, Bequerel, and Turpin - then prepared a report and analysis of Cagniard-Latour's Mémoire, which they presented in 1838, which I have also transcribed in its entirety; and then Turpin separately produced a Mémoire sur la cause et les effets de la fermentation alcoolique et acéteuse, which he presented the same year. In it, he reviews Cagniard-Latour's research in detail, repeats his major experiments, adds many of his own, and provides - since he was a famous scientific illustrator - several pages of plates illustrating the microorganisms he observed. I have transcribed a chapter from this work as well, and include one of the plates, in which Turpin depicts an organism that he named Torula cervisiæ. It is what we now call Saccharomyces cerevisiæ, and is, and always has been, the most important yeast in the fermentation of both wine and beer.
:: The first thing that is surprising in all this is that so little of it is wrong; Cagniard-Latour's paper could still serve today to enlighten the freshman microbiology class as to what it means to reason intelligently through a microscope.
:: The second thing that is surprising, is that it had no effect. Despite being the work of internationally respected scientists, despite being accepted and published by one of the world's most important scientific institutions - and, of course, despite being correct - it was simply shouted down, as was the work of two lesser-known researchers in Germany, Schwann and Kützing, who independently both of each other and of Cagniard-Latour, arrived at similar results.
:: The attacks were led by three of the era's most important chemists - Justus von Liebig, J.J. Berzelius, and F. Wöhler - and were reprehensible. Since they had absolutely no experimental evidence to disprove a cellular theory of fermentation, they simply ridiculed its proponents. Wöhler, for example, excerpted parts of Turpin's paper in the Annalen der Pharmacie - of which he and Liebig were the principal editors - and followed these excerpts by a a heavy-handed burlesque, written by him but attributed anonymously, entitled "The demystified secret of alcoholic fermentation" [Wöhler, F. (anonymous) (1839) Ann. Pharm. (Heidelberg) 29, 100-104]. The [anonymous] author pretended to have done careful research with a special microscope: ...Incredible numbers of small spheres are seen which are the eggs of animals. When placed in sugar solution, they swell, burst, and animals develop from them which multiply with inconceivable speed. The shape of these animals is different from any of the hitherto described 600 species. They have the shape of a Beindorf distilling flask (without the cooling device). The tube of the bulb is some sort of a suction trunk which is covered inside with fine long bristles. Teeth and eyes are not observed. Incidentally, one can clearly distinguish a stomach, intestinal tract, the anus (as a pink point), and the organs of urine excretion. From the moment of emergence from the egg, one can see how the animals swallow the sugar of the medium and how it gets into the stomach. It is digested immediately, and this process is recognized with certainty from the elimination of excrements. In short, these infusoria eat sugar, eliminate alcohol from the intestinal tract, and CO2 from the urinary organs. The urinary bladder in its filled state has the shape of a champagne bottle, in the empty state it is a small bud. After some practice, one observes that inside a gas bubble is formed, which increases its volume up to tenfold; by some screw-like torsion, which the animal controls by means of circular muscles around the body, the emptying of the bladder is accomplished... From the anus of the animal one can see the incessant emergence of a fluid that is lighter than the liquid medium, and from their enormously large genitals a stream of CO2 is squirted at very short intervals... If the quantity of water is insufficient, i.e. the concentration of sugar too high, fermentation does not take place in the viscous liquid. This is because the little organisms cannot change their place in the viscous liquid: they die from indigestion caused by lack of exercise. The "report" goes on to describe how the animals fall asleep under the influence of a sedative, how they produce fusel oil by sweating and how they devour each other after the fermentation.
:: In addition to its general sophmoric prurience, one must note its remarkable lack of relevance to Turpin's paper; the puerile jokes about anuses and genitals, for example, are entirely problems of Wöhler's own, particularly since neither Cagniard-Latour nor Turpin says virtually anything about "animals" to begin with. They ascribe their microorganisms to the "vegetal" realm, their only reservation being whether "animal" and "vegetable" are useful categories in dealing with such life forms.
:: One is a little hard-pressed to account for such intellectual Schadenfreude on the part of such otherwise well-respected scientists, especially in the service of a cause that turned out to be so spectacularly incorrect scientifically; but clearly the idea of microbial life provoked a visceral reaction of anger and authoritarian rejection that mere experimental evidence was powerless to overcome. And their opposition was consistent; Liebig's opposition to Pasteur's experimental results twenty years later was just as complete, and his arguments no more valid. All told, they can fairly be said to have delayed the general establishment of microbiology as a science by at least thirty years.
:: But of course the purpose of contemplating history isn't so much to jump on dead fools as to avoid being live ones ourselves, and there is nothing better than history to teach us the enormity of that task, nor to entertain us while we fail at it.
:: So, it is quite right to wonder why the Greeks did not intuitively understand the microbe, as they intuitively understood the atom; or to wonder how entire millenia of wine-makers could contemplate the astonishing spectacle of fermentation without collectively concluding that is an "obviously" living process of "obviously" living creatures.
:: But, it it by no means right to wonder at those things without wondering at the enormity of all that surrounds us now, that we do not understand, that is equally "obvious".
:: From the Latin, ob + via, "near (to) the way" ::

NOTES:
1. The translation of Wöhler's parody of Turpin is taken from: Fritz Schlenk, (1997) "Early Research on Fermentation - a Story of Missed Opportunities" , in New Beer in an Old Bottle: Eduard Buchner and the Growth of Biochemical Knowledge (ed. Athel Cornish-Bowden), Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain. Its use here is gratefully acknowledged.
2. Turpin was, in addition to being a plant physiologist, one of the leading botanical illustrators of his time. The 1840 edition of his Mémoire contains a series of extremely important plates depicting the microbes he saw through his microscope; I have reproduced one of these as a separate file. Since he comments on it at length in the text, I highly recommend that you download and print it - preferably on high-quality matte "photographic" paper - to accompany the anthology itself.
3. Addendum as of November, 2002: When first posted in March of this year, this anthology of early texts on the discovery of fermentation as a living process significantly lacked an opposing view; that is, it lacked the expression of a position explicitly opposed to the idea that fermentation is the result of microbial life.
:: I'm pleased to be able to remedy that lack now with an essentially unknown paper by Jean-Jacques Colin (1784-1865), who worked with Gay-Lussac for many years, then became Professor of Chemistry at St. Cyr and later at Dijon. It is called Nouveau Mémoire sur la Fermentation, was first read before the Académie des Sciences, and was then published separately as a 43 page pamphlet ca. 1837, which is the edition from which this transcription was made.
:: I've been able to find no other record of this text; my own copy is from Becquerel's library, so perhaps it was only printed in a small private edition for distribution to colleagues of the author.
:: In any case it is ideally suited to its purpose here: it reflects scientific research carried out at the same time and in the same place as the other papers presented; it is the work of a competent and thorough scientist, clearly aware of the findings of Cagniard-Latour and others, who uses much the same equipment and many of the same procedures, but nonetheless comes to quite opposite conclusions.

TO THE TEXT

TO THE PLATE

::

:: DR. JULES GUYOT ::

:: Culture de la Vigne et Vinification; 2nd. ed., Paris, 1861 ::

:: Why the French are better than everybody ::

:: Dr. Guyot points out that if a host should find that bitter quarrels - or worse - are breaking out among his dinner guests; if instead of the frank and lively gaiety, the sallies of spirit and manifestations of universal benevolence that are the result of good wine, a few gross pleasantries and a heavy silence is all his guests can manage, it's because his wines are worthless, and he'll have to find better ones if he expects his table to scintillate with the spirit, cordiality, confidence and gaiety that are so entirely French.
:: He goes on to explain that drinks do not act only upon the individual; they react upon families, tribes, and nations; and he is profoundly convinced that the wines of France are the primary cause of the frankness, the generosity, and the value of the French character, incontestably superior to that of all other nations.
:: Furthermore, the inhabitants of a beer-drinking nation could never show the vivacity of spirit and the gaiety of a wine-drinking country, nor could the people of a cider-drinking country be as forthright as the people of a land of vineyards.
:: He concludes that alcohol is not the secret to the value of wine, and that all wine is good provided it preserve its organic life, which it demonstrates by its forthright aroma, by the combination of all its elements in a harmony of taste, by easy digestibility, an appreciable augmentation of muscular force, and by an increased activity of mind and body. ::

TO THE TEXT