My recent post on the Domaine Port Carras Bordeaux blend reminded me of the role of Emile Peynaud as the founding wine consultant for that estate. Further, it reminded me of Mr Peynaud's role in the development of "modern wine," a role which I recount in this post.
Looking through the lens of history, Lukacs (Inventing Wine) paints a stark picture of the roles of human control and science in the construction of the wine industry that we know today. According to Lukacs,
At the end of the Second World War, a veteran grape grower in virtually any European country could look back over a lifetime of long, hard toil and remember little more than trouble, years marked by deceased vineyards, financial collapse, commerce filled with fraud and horribly violent conflict.Further, consumers were not drinking wine as much anymore because municipal water was now safe and clean and refrigeration allowed milk and other perishable beverages to be distributed widely. The social drink of choice was a cocktail. The wine industry, such as it was, needed to revitalize itself. And that it did. Again Lukacs:
From expressing terroir in the vineyard, to employing new technology in order to attain consistency in the winery and stability in the bottle, the potential intimated during wine's initial modernization began to be achieved on an astonishingly broad scale ... Starting slowly in the 1950s and 1960s, but then quickly gaining momentum in the following decades, the quality of not just exclusive, expensive cuvees but also widely available and moderately priced wines rose to previously unimagined heights.
Lukacs points out that winemaking in the first half of the 20th century was a reprise of thousands of years past -- "a process of letting nature run its course." But beginning in the 1950s and 1960s grape growers and winemakers began to employ new tools to attain specific "stylistic and qualitative ends." On the technical side, the introduction of temperature control and regular chemical analysis allowed greater control over the fermentation and this gave greater impetus to the concept that humans "could and should assume control" of the winemaking process.
The concept of human control of the winemaking process was not new, according to Lukacs. It began with Enlightenment scientists such as Antoine Lavoisier and Jean-Antoine-Claude Chaptal in the 1700s, continued through Pasteur (with his discoveries of the role of yeasts and bacteria in fermentation and spoilage) and the work of Emile Peynaud (both in his lab and working with the Bordeaux Chateaus) to convert his research to actionable inputs into the winemaking process.
Peynaud's contribution included refrigeration, understanding the role of malolactic fermentation, and the need for rigorous selection in the vineyard. His efforts changed the stylistic and qualitative character of the Bordeaux wines such that the "whites became less tart and vegetal and the reds more supple and sensuous, fuller in flavor but less astringent."
Peynaud was born in 1912 in Madiran and started out working as a cellar worker for a negociant. Hisd career as an enologist began in the 1930s and ended upon his retirement in 1990. Mr. Peynaud died in July, 2004.
When Peynaud began his work in the early 1950s, growers were harvesting early and, as a result, the wines were "excessively green or vegetal." He observed that there was a further striking uniformity about the wines: they were all oxidized.
Information gleaned from a reading of Clark Smith's Postmodern Winemaking shows that some of the post-WWII winemaking innovations identified by Lukacs were (i) much more granular than indicated and (ii) originated in Germany, rather than in France (and Emile Peynaud).
Based on Clark Smith's interpretation of the history of that period, the "tools of 20th century winemaking" were stainless steel, inert gas, refrigeration, and sterile filtration (a product of nuclear energy) and this "modern winemaking revolution exploded out of Germany" in the form of Rieslings that were fresh, sterile-filtered, and completely without oxidative characters. According to Smith: "the idea of a light, sweet, fresh, fruity wine like Blue Nun was as world changing as color television."
These tools and techniques were adopted by Peynaud and other scientists in France and, from there, migrated to the US.
Regardless of the source of the techniques, it was Peynaud's writing, teaching, consulting, and communicating that caused the winemakers along the Gironde to replace their long-held beliefs and practices with Peynaud's. His was no ivory tower approach. He spoke to the lowest cellarman or highest-level executive with the same clear, unassuming tones and generally won them over to his approach. According to one account, at the peak he had more than 1560 clients in the Bordeaux area alone.
It was not only the producers that had to be convinced, however. The largest market for Bordeaux wine -- claret -- was the UK and drinkers there looked askance at wines that did not require long periods of aging before they were ready to drink. The referred to Peynaud's approach as "Peynaudization," a precursor to our more recent attacks on the "Parkerization" of wine. Unlike Parker, however (and Michel Rolland and the "garagistes"), Peynaud believed strongly in balanced wines.
Peynaud was as accomplished a wine taster as he was a winemaker. His book The Taste of Wine is considered one of the classics in the field. His aversion to oxygen exposure extends all the way to wine drinking in that he did not believe in decanting wine for oxygen exposure.
Both Isabelle Legeron (Natural Wine) and Clark Smith (postmodern winemaking) are of a mind that technological advances in the post-WWII period changed the nature of winemaking and wine. As a result, they contend, today's product does not compare favorably with the wines of yore. Their solution to this jointly perceived problem differs markedly though, with each casting a jaded eye at the other's approach (natural wine for Ms. Legeron and postmodern winemaking for Smith). Ms. Legeron refers to some of the tools in Smith's postmodern toolkit as "intervention technologies" while Smith titled a chapter in his book "Natural Wine Nonsense."
I have previously related how the restriction of access to oxygen resulted in the creation of crisp white wines in Germany, an approach that was quickly adopted in Bordeaux. Smith sees this as the beginning of the end for red wines of pre-war profundity as Emile Peynaud, the famed French enologist, declared oxygen the enemy of wine and, in so doing, launched the age of solution chemistry and scientific enology. According to Smith, "modern day winemaking has been useful in eliminating gross defects but has done little to promote excellence."
I would like to push back gently against Mr. Smith's assertion that (i) wines were probably better in the past and (ii) that we lost our ability to produce wines of that type due to the post-war technology advances and winemaking changes. The implication contained therein is that the wines of yore were "better" than the wines of today. Hence the need for a postmodern-style of winemaking.
As it relates to how good wine was in the past, I direct the readers' attention to Paul Lukacs (Inventing Wine) scholarship laying out the conditions that prevailed pre- and post-war and the role of science (and Emile Peynaud) in bringing winemaking under control.
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