PART I

Technological and Organizational
Change in Europe, 1840–1914

FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS wine has been widely produced and drunk in western Europe. Traditional preindustrial economies often had high levels of underemployment, which made the vine attractive as it provided considerable employment opportunities during “all seasons, to all ages and both sexes.”¹ According to the French historian Le Roy Ladurie, the “classic response of Mediterranean agriculture to a rise in population” was to “plant trees or vines on old or new assarts, thereby increasing the returns from agriculture by more intensive forms of land utilization.”² This essentially Malthusian vision assumes that output at best grew with population growth and implies little or no change in labor productivity that might have helped improve living standards.³ In fact, long before 1840 growers were also quick to extend their vines when grape prices increased and new opportunities to trade opened.⁴ Some of Europe’s most dynamic agricultural regions included Bordeaux and Champagne, which specialized in viticulture, and the key to their success, as the highly observant James Busby noted in the early 1830s, was the substitution of capital for land and labor. Yet in most regions prior to the railways during the second half of the nineteenth century, production remained labor-intensive, and the wine produced was very ordinary.

The production and marketing of wines in Europe were transformed beyond recognition in the period between 1840 and 1914. Improved production methods and declining transport costs led to more integrated markets, regional specialization, and a major increase in consumption in producer countries. The appearance of new vine diseases led to the need for cash payments for chemicals and pesticides. Wine shortages also increased farm gate prices, which encouraged the spread of commercial viticulture to new areas and stimulated a huge amount of scientific research on vine growing, leading in turn to higher yields. Unfortunately for wine producers, high prices also encouraged widespread adulteration, so that when domestic wine consumption recovered by the turn of the century, prices collapsed.

This part looks at the growth in output of cheap table wines in Europe, the impact of the vine disease phylloxera, and how the problems caused by overproduction and adulteration in domestic markets were resolved. The French market was central to events, as not only was it responsible for about a third of the world’s production in 1909–13, but it also accounted for 60 percent of world imports. The rapid spread of new vine diseases, such as oidium (powdery mildew), phylloxera, and downy mildew, was resolved mainly by French scientists, while the contributions of Chaptal and Pasteur marked the beginning of a proper understanding of fermentation and wine making. By the First World War a major distinction had developed between traditional and modern viticulture, with the former defined by growers using labor-intensive production methods and surplus labor to increase the size of their holdings, and the latter dependent on capital markets.

Chapter 1 looks at the nature of grape production and wine making on the eve of the railways. Chapter 2 examines the impact of phylloxera and the widespread changes in viticulture and wine-making technologies, while chapter 3 looks at the response of growers to overproduction, fraud, and declining wine prices at a time of rising labor costs. By 1914 French winegrowers had established a degree of political influence, which required the state to intervene at periodic intervals when adverse movements of supply and demand threatened growers’ livelihoods.

¹ Gasparin (1848, 4:595). In southern Spain in the 1920s, for example, cereals provided only 25 days employment a year, olives between 31 and 62 days, but viticulture between 44 and 237 days. The figures for cereals do not include land left fallow in alternative years. Extensive and intensive irrigation created 175 and 375 days employment, respectively (Carrión 1932/1975:324, 341–42).

² Le Roy Ladurie (1976:56–57).

³ Lewis (1978, chap. 8) argued that unlimited areas of suitable land and underemployed labor in the late nineteenth century resulted in the supply increasing without productivity changes, producing stagnant or declining living standards among producers of tropical farm commodities.

⁴ For example, the historian Pierre Vilar (1962), in his classic account of eighteenth-century Catalonia, argued that the expansion of local viticulture increased the demand for manufactured goods, helping to stimulate economic growth.