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Overview
Not only does Loubre explain how altered environmental conditions have enabled pioneering enologists to create styles of wine more suited to contemporary tastes and living arrangements, but he also discusses the social impact of the wine revolution on the employees in the industry. The third generation of this new viticultural regime has encountered working and living conditions drastically different from those of its predecessors, while witnessing the near disappearance of the working class and the decline of small and medium growers of ordinary wines.
Originally published in 1990.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691600871 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1096 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Wine Revolution in France
The Twentieth Century
By Leo A. Loubère
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1990 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05592-3
CHAPTER 1
General Trends and Conditions since 1914
Wine in World War I
It was unfortunate that Europe was not ruled, in the late summer of 1914, by men who tended vines. They would never have made war. How could they have contemplated any activity other than the preparation of their baskets for grape harvesting and their vats for wine making? They were not lacking in patriotism, nor were they all averse to violent collective action, as they had revealed on several occasions in the past. Their desire for peace in August and September would have resulted rather from their personal interests. As a vintage year 1914 was promising of grapes of ample quantity and good quality. Of course there had been spring frosts, some loss of flowers, attacks by insects and powdery mildew, but these adversities had merely reduced the crop, making for higher prices, and had not lessened the richness of sugar, which would also boost value by increasing the alcohol level. When August came, all growers were eagerly prepared to harvest a fine crop of grapes, not to make war. A generous fate, however, was not on their side. The nations of Europe were ruled by nationalists whose attention and territorial appetites were fixed on boundary lines, not vine rows, and who threw Europe into a war that unsettled or destroyed the peaceful ways of life learned during most of the nineteenth century.
The conflict, breaking out just as the grape harvest was scheduled to start, had an immediate effect: nearly all the healthy males over eighteen were called to the colors. Peasants, among whom were a large contingent of vignerons, filled out the ranks of foot soldiers, the poilus, the cannon fodder, as they came to be called. They did not depart alone. Their animals—horses and mules—were also conscripted to transport provisions, draw artillery, and provide mounts for the cavalry. Left at home were women, children, and old folk, and it was they who picked a record crop of grapes and who produced nearly sixty million hectoliters of wine, well above the forty-four million of 1913. This harvest undertaking was of truly heroic proportions.
Of equal magnitude was the problem of marketing the wine. Here was a dilemma unique to vignerons. Growers of cereals, green crops, meat, and wood did not find their markets so suddenly disorganized by conscription and by the ferocious battles resulting from national hatreds. The government and its need to feed millions of troops replaced their foreign markets. These troops, it must be noted, marched on the strength of their stomachs rather than that of their bladders. Although a small serving of alcohol (one-sixteenth liter) had been issued daily until 1901, wine did not enter soldiers' rations until 1908, when the Chamber of Deputies voted two million francs for wine, to help distressed producers. By 1914 the ration for troops on maneuver came to a mere quarter liter, hardly enough to improve the market. Worse, with the outbreak of war, producers, especially those in the Midi and the west, suddenly faced a loss of European markets as well as a lack of vehicles and rail transport, both monopolized by the government for military needs.
A solution emerged from the Midi where nearly everyone accepted as gospel the notion that wine is a health-giving beverage. There was no doubt, growers affirmed militantly, that wine-drinking soldiers are more valiant in battle and resistant to typhus. Whether myth or truth, this belief, along with a combination of patriotism and self-interest, induced some Languedocians to send about 200,000 hectoliters of their gros rouge to military hospitals and camps, asserting that all soldiers needed a wine ration. They even paid the taxes on it, and the Revue de viticulture could hardly be less than a vigorous advocate of this proposal.
Alexandre Millerand, the minister of war in late 1914, decided to initiate the distribution of wine to soldiers. He reasoned that perhaps Pasteur was right in claiming that wine is a healthy drink, certainly safer than the local water supplied in the trenches. The ration began roughly as twenty-five centiliters per day, then rose to fifty centiliters in 1916, when the army bought six million hectoliters, and to twelve million the next year. This supply consisted of ordinary wine, vin de consummation courante (VCC), and government purchases absorbed vast portions of it, especially after the terrible vintage of 1915. Lack of manpower, fertilizer, chemical sprays, and animals, combined with adverse weather, had reduced that crop to a mere twenty million hectoliters, worse than the 1910 vintage. The problem of transport and storage of such large quantities was overcome by professional merchants who were in the army, the hiring of railway tank cars from private companies, and the creation of distribution centers at Montpellier, Narbonne, Nîmes, Marseille, Bordeaux, Rouen, and Paris.
The producers of VCC in the south and Bordeaux were saved. They were more than saved; they were enriched. Money now flowed into the countryside as the price of wine and numerous other foodstuffs went up sharply. Before the war, ordinary wine sold for about twenty-five francs per hectoliter and degree of alcohol; by 1918 the average price was close to ninety francs for military purchases and over one hundred francs in the civilian market. Inflation eroded some of this gain, yet vignerons were able to pay off debts contracted in the 1880s and after, when they or their parents had borrowed to replace vines killed by the phylloxera. This was a boon for those who escaped death or mutilation in the trenches. For the lucky, the brave, and the clever who survived, favorable changes had taken place during their absence and after their return. Most notable was the increase in wine consumption after the war. Men who had rarely or never tasted wine had acquired a penchant for it, and they, added to the number of long-standing drinkers, provided a sizable market during the decade following hostilities, when consumption climbed to seventy million hectoliters, an average of 136 liters per head by the mid-twenties. Given the terrible experiences of poilus during the four years of slaughter, those who returned home had an almost unquenchable thirst.
Even before the armistice brought an end to fighting in November 1918, grape harvests were falling short of demand. Women, adolescents, and old men could not maintain the vineyards. Their weaknesses were compounded by the scarcity of work animals and of chemical sprays. After the skimpy crop of 1915 the government, concerned that low supply caused prices to rise unduly, began importing wine, two to four million hectoliters, from Spain and Portugal, and even from Argentina until the Atlantic crossing proved too expensive. Imports from Algeria rose to eight million hectoliters in 1915, then fell to two million in 1917 and 1918. In places where native Moslem workers were numerous and cheap there was no labor shortage. Spain, on the other hand, exported not only wine but also thousands of workers, because the labor shortage became increasingly acute. German prisoners were sent to farms and vineyards to help with harvests, but only large estates could use them because the war ministry required a contingent of at least twenty workers, and seven soldiers to guard them. I know of at least one case in Vosne-Romanée in Burgundy where a prisoner was an expert vigneron; he overhauled the property, improving it beyond the capability of its owner. Indeed, growers in eastern France, nearer the front, were lucky inasmuch as they could hire off-duty soldiers to help out. The army even released many men at harvest time precisely so they could pick grapes.
The major wine regions of France underwent various experiences in wartime. It seems likely that growers of VCC benefited more than those committed to the production of fine wines. The Languedoc-Roussillon vineyards profited on a grand scale, although in economic, not human terms, for numerous vignerons never returned from Flanders fields and were buried far from their vines. Before 1914 many of them had cried out against the excess of political centralization in Paris and the cultural imperialism of the north. Once war broke out, however, they rallied to the tricolor with unstinting patriotism and fervor—and paid the price.
The region of Bordeaux, on the other hand, passed through a more traumatic experience. No less patriotic, the Bordelais, as the region and natives of Bordeaux are called, was less economically fortunate. Its VCC sold well. It was an army supplier second only to Languedoc, but its viticulture differed dramatically from that of the south. Its VCC fetched a higher price as a product of more solid quality, 46.50 francs per hectoliter as compared to 35 and 42 francs for seven- to twelve-degree wine of the Midi. Yet the Bordelais hardly broke the long cycle of depression that had followed the phylloxera of the 1880s. There was a persistence of adverse weather and mediocre harvests, and when the army began requisitioning supplies it took huge quantities, nearly a fourth of the crop in 1917, and fixed prices too low. Loud protests began, and representatives of the Gironde department called for an end to requisitioning. Regional producers were adversely affected because they grew a larger amount of grapes for fine wine than those of the lower Midi. The army was not interested in fine wine for its soldiers and therefore provided neither a significant labor supply nor tax incentives; it just waited for the protests to dissipate. Meanwhile, Bordeaux fine wines, which constituted a significant part of the region's total production, were usually more profitable than simple wines, but still in serious difficulty.
The reasons for this result are not complex. First, all growers complained that the economics ministry was taxing French wines "out of existence." The ministry, however, looked upon fine wines as a luxury of the rich who should help pay for the war. This was not a very menacing "soak-the-rich" fiscal policy. The government simply did not intend to weaken private property and family wealth by a policy of highly progressive taxation on income, so the men in power relied on indirect taxes. It is true that a majority in the two chambers, deputies and senators, passed a progressive income-tax law during hostilities out of the need to finance the war, but they neglected to insist on its vigorous enforcement. That is, the fiscal bureaucracy did not see eye-to-eye with the legislature about taxes on income, and it preferred sales, transport, and property taxes as a means of augmenting revenues to wage an inordinately expensive war. Such impositions severely affected all wines, but superior ones in particular. Second, fine wines ran into protective tariffs and heavy internal duties in friendly countries such as Great Britain, which had the effect of raising retail prices and limiting consumption. Finally, major prewar markets, such as Germany, were closed or, as in Russia, curtailed by political turmoil that ended in revolution.
Burgundian wines suffered similar problems. There, as in Bordeaux, government prices were too low to cover all expenses, and although requisitioning was limited, it imposed storage costs on growers who had to keep the wine until the army could arrange for its transfer to the troops, an enterprise that could take months. During that time losses through evaporation consumed between 7 and 10 percent of the crop per year in estate cellars that were not sufficiently humid, and where small oak barrels were used for storage. Loss through evaporation was much less serious for VCC producers who used glass-lined brick vats with airtight covers, which curtailed losses during fermentation and storage.
It does not seem that the winegrowers of either the Loire or the Rhone Valley were in a position to benefit seriously from army acquisitions. They had only belatedly begun to replant after the phylloxera wiped out their vineyards, and had turned to other crops. Reconstitution in the Loire Valley made little headway as long as vignerons remained convinced that grafted vines would produce an inferior wine. Consequently there was little vine surface in either valley before 1914. Grape and wine growing were supplementary crops—really cash crops—but only part of a polycultural regime in which fruit (Loire) and olives (Rhone) were just as important—even more important as prices for wine declined after 1900.
The vineyard region that did not at all benefit from the war was Champagne. When Alsace fell into German hands in 1870–71, along with much of the Moselle vineyard, France's most northerly vines were suddenly those of Champagne. Although one of the most prestigious wine areas, it was relatively small in size, only fourteen thousand hectares in the Marne department. Most of the vineyards were owned by individual growers who had one or two hectares and sold their grapes to the more than one hundred champagne firms. They were the men who rioted in 1911, full of anger against the firms that blended southern wine into the cuvées that were labeled as pure champagne. At the height of their fury they destroyed several wineries and spilled the contents of vats, barrels, and bottles into gutters until the towns reeked of the acrid odor of stale wine. The first battle of the Marne, however, made that destruction seem trivial. The Germans launched a massive campaign through the Ardennes, a maneuver that convinced Champenois like Monsieur Moreau-Berillon that the "Huns" had not been satisfied with robbing France of her Alsatian vineyard in 1871—they started the war in 1914 to take over Champagne as well. When French artillery finally halted the German advance, Monsieur Moreau-Berillon, like all other winegrowers, was convinced that the soldiers' wine ration, their pinard, had instilled in them the ferocious fighting spirit that saved these precious vines.
Well, not the vines, merely the land. When the Battle of the Marne ended in the stalemate of immobile trench warfare, the vineyards of Champagne became part of a long battlefield. And on the battlefield, where civilization was doggedly struggling against barbarism, champagne was the vin de civilisation, as Talleyrand had once put it. The old vineyard was thoroughly destroyed, largely by fighting and trench-digging, but also by the inability of vignerons to defend their vines against another old enemy: the deadly aphid, phylloxera. When this plague had struck in the 1890s, growers, aided by the larger firms, had sought to defend their own-root vines by the use of carbon bisulfide (or disulfide), a powerful chemical injected into the soil near the roots, which killed enough of the aphids to save the plant. It was a terribly costly process but enabled growers to replant slowly so that they could continue to harvest the fine grapes of old vines while new vines matured. Delay of reconversion was also the result of highly chalky soil in which pure American rootstock, resistant to the phylloxera, suffered from chlorosis.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Wine Revolution in France by Leo A. Loubère. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. ix
- TABLES, pg. xi
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xiii
- ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE TEXT, pg. xiv
- INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
- CHAPTER ONE. Qeneral Trends and Conditions since 1914, pg. 16
- CHAPTER TWO. The Viticultural Revolution, pg. 37
- CHAPTER THREE. Viniculture: The Marriage of Pragmatism and Theory, pg. 76
- CHAPTER FOUR. The Attack on Fraud: Classification and Appellation, pg. 113
- CHAPTER FIVE. Cooperatives among Individualists, pg. 137
- CHAPTER SIX. The Economics of Wine, pg. 155
- CHAPTER SEVEN. The Commerce of Wine, pg. 177
- CHAPTER EIGHT. Conditions of Life: Propertied Growers, pg. 212
- CHAPTER NINE. Conditions of Life: Laborers, pg. 244
- CONCLUSION, pg. 260
- NOTES, pg. 267
- INDEX, pg. 283