by Bee Wilson
It was by accident that Gockel discovered the evils in the habit of “correcting” wines with lead. Over the Christmas holidays in 1694— a time when festive cheer may have encouraged some of the monks to indulge a little too heartily—the prelate of the Teutonic Order of the Knights of Ulm and several of his monks developed colic. Gockel was summoned. His first impulse was to check the wells and the kitchen, neither of which had anything amiss. Gockel noticed that all the monks who had not drunk wine had been spared the colic. Then, on one of his visits to the ailing monks, he accepted a glass of wine and soon found himself feverish and with chronic colic pain. After much investigation, he eventually tracked down the recipe for this wine from a dealer near Göppingen and found that it contained litharge. At once, lead became the prime suspect. To make sure, Gockel did some experiments. He took the “worst and sourest wine” he could find and by adding litharge managed to convert it into the “best and loveliest of wine”—the word he used was süsselectenlieblichen, one of those untranslatable German words, conveying a zenith of delectable sweetness.13 Loveliest except for the fact that it caused horrific stomachaches.
Gockel’s discovery did not entirely eliminate lead from alcoholic drinks, however. In the late eighteenth century, there was wide incidence in the English county of Devon of “Devonshire colic”—the result of lead poisoning from cider. Opinion differed as to how the lead got there. In 1767 and 1768, George Baker published articles arguing that the cider was contaminated by lead in cider presses. In 1778, however, James Hardy insisted that it was not the presses that were to blame but the lead-glazed earthenware from which the poor of Devon drank their hard apple cider. The acid in the cider dissolved some of the lead in the glaze. This explained why the poor were the most susceptible to Devonshire colic, since they were the ones who used earthenware, while the rich drank out of safer vessels made of glass and stone.
This lead poisoning was accidental. Similar problems arose when wine bottles were cleaned with lead shot. But the deliberate addition of lead to wine carried on too. In 1750, the tax inspectors of France were “astonished” by the huge volume of spoiled wine—vin gâté—being brought into Paris; this inferior wine was used, perfectly legally, to make vinegar. In this case, however, a number of wine merchants had registered themselves as vinegar merchants in order to have access to this cheap vinegary wine, which they touched up with litharge and then sold, presumably at a great profit, as real wine.14 Still more blatantly, a book of 1795 called Valuable Secrets Concerning the Arts and Trades recommended sweetening “turned wine”—in other words, wine that had turned acid—with a “quarter of a pint of good wine vinegar saturated with Litharge.”15 It makes you wonder how such attitudes could persist, so long after lead had been proved a poison. Frederick Accum answered this question in his Treatise on Adulterations of 1820. Lead continued to be added to wine, he argued, because “there appears no other method known of rapidly recovering ropy wines.” As for the moral dimension, “Wine merchants persuade themselves that the minute quantity of lead employed for that purpose is perfectly harmless and that no atom of lead remains in the wine. Chemical analysis proves the contrary; and the practice of clarifying spoiled white wines by means of lead, must be pronounced as highly deleterious.” To Accum, the vintner or wine dealer who “practises this dangerous sophistication, adds the crime of murder to that of fraud, and deliberately scatters the seeds of disease and death among those consumers who contribute to his emolument.”16
Accum’s publicity probably contributed to the decline in the use of lead in wine. It was also harder to doctor wines with lead once reliable chemical tests were developed for its detection. In 1818, the French scientist Mathieu Joseph Bonaventure Orfila (1787–1853) listed no fewer than nine different tests for wines adulterated with lead; for example “they scarcely redden the tincture of turnsole because the acid which they naturally contain is saturated by the oxide of lead.”17 But still the dosing and doctoring of wine continued, in manifold forms. Wine making was an art that liked to shroud itself in mystery, and the trade secrets being hidden were often criminal. A Renaissance critic complained that the vintner was “a kind of Negromancer, for at midnight when all men are in bed, then he . . . falls to his charms and spells, so that he tumbles one hogshead into another and can make a cup of Claret that has lost its colour to look high with a dash of red wine at his pleasure.”18 In strikingly similar terms, more than a century on, in the Tatler magazine of February 1710, Addison observed that
There is, in this city, a certain fraternity of chemical operators, who work underground in holes, caverns and dark retirements, to conceal their mysteries from the eyes and observation of mankind. These subterraneous philosophers are daily employed in the transmutation of liquors, and by the power of magical drugs and incantations, raising under the streets of London the choicest products of the hills and valleys of France. They can squeeze Bordeaux out of the sloe, and draw Champagne from an apple.19
These “subterraneous philosophers,” also known as “wine brewers” because they could brew up wine from virtually anything, had their counterparts all over Europe. Sicilian growers in the nineteenth century were notorious for adding chalk to many wines, not only to preserve them, but to speed up clarification and improve the wine’s colour.20 This chalked wine—vino gessato—became so common that foreign buyers lost trust in Sicilian wine and were made to pay a premium for nonchalked wine—in other words, forced to pay extra for something that should have been standard all along.
French wine was regularly falsified too. During the 1870s, when French vineyards were struck by vine blight, there was a “notable increase in dishonesty.”21 To maximize yields, wine-makers started to make watery brews from the second, third, and even fourth pressings of grapes. Then, to give an illusion of body, they would be coloured with fuchsine, which contains arsenic. Things hadn’t really progressed much from the days of Chaucer, whose Pardoner urged:
Keep clear of wine, I tell you, white or red,
Especially Spanish wines which they provide
And have on sale in Fish Street and Cheapside.
That wine mysteriously finds its way
To mix itself with others—shall we say
Spontaneously?—that grow in neighbouring regions.22
Until the 1900s, when a much stricter classification system came in for French wine and the wine-making industry modernized its techniques, the story of wine swindling is one more of continuity than of change. It assumed many forms, but the universal trick was the attempt to pass bad wine off as good. In Bordeaux in the 1850s, they might do this through chemical wizardry, distilling the bouquet of fine claret from various artificial potions.23 In the fifteenth century, the chemicals were more basic—one source mentions “eggs, alum, gums and other horrible and unwholesome things,” but the fundamental aim was the same: to touch up undrinkable wine.24
How was such dishonesty policed? With endless, and endlessly evaded, punishments and prohibitions. There have been laws against wine adulteration ever since Charlemagne, who, in 802, issued what was probably the earliest edict against fraudulent wine in the post-classical age.25 Indeed, it has been said that “for there to be a wine fraud” in the first place, “there must be a wine law.”26 The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were particularly rich in wine laws, many of them local to certain cities. In 1364, John Penrose, a vintner, was called before the mayor of London and found guilty of selling bad wine. He was ordered “to drink a draught” of his own bad wine and have the remainder poured over his head, before abandoning “the calling of vintner in the city for ever”;27 if he sold bad wine elsewhere, though, the mayor wasn’t going to stop him. Also in 1364, the town council of Colmar in Alsace made it an offence for an innkeeper to adulterate wine by adding water, brandy, sulphur, salt, or any other ingredient.28 There were also countless attempts by the authorities to stop vintners and innkeepers from mingling different kinds of wine, and/or passing off plonk as fine wine. In 1419, a “Wil
liam Horold” was convicted of “counterfeiting good and true Romney wine. He took old and feeble Spanish wine” and added “powder of bay” and other “unwholesome” powders.29 Similarly, in 1415 the town innkeepers of Bordeaux were summoned to the town hall and told that if there were any more cases of passing off other wines as those of Bordeaux, the offenders would be put in the pillory and banished from the town.30
In England, the fourteenth century saw detailed legislation to protect wine drinkers from fraud. On 8 November 1327, Edward III decreed that weak and out-of-condition wine could not be mixed with any other.31 By the same law, he determined as well that every customer had the right to see his wine being drawn from the cask, and it was forbidden to put a curtain over the doorway leading down to the innkeeper’s cellar. New and old wine were not be blended, or even stored in the same inn. Rhine wines could not be sold by someone who sold the wines of Gascony, La Rochelle, and Spain.
This was a remarkably explicit decree. So why didn’t it work? Why was Accum in 1820 still complaining about “factitious” wines—of “port” flavoured with a tincture of raisins; of wine corks dyed red to look as if they had been in long contact with the wine; of weak wines given “a rough austere taste, a fine colour and a peculiar flavour” with the use of astringents?32 One of the reasons wine was especially prone to adulteration was that, unlike ale, it was a luxury good, and an imported one. Premium comestibles—tea in the nineteenth century, spices always—are especially tempting for fraudsters. Why therefore did wine not lose its reputation in the centuries before the twentieth century, when it was such an unreliable drink? Why, despite all the frauds to which it was subject, did it retain a glamour and even an image of wholesomeness?
Partly, this must have been because not all wine was debased. In a good year, when the harvest was full and ripe, the wine-makers of Burgundy or Chianti must have made some fine bottles. Even if they did not understand the science of what they were doing, hundreds of years of experience must have given wine-making families the ability to make enjoyable and wholesome wines from good grapes. The problems mainly arose, as we have seen, when the grapes themselves were not good, which was when even respectable vintners resorted to chemical adjustments.
Sometimes, though, wine’s reputation was simply relative. During the eighteenth century, wine could seem healthy because at least it wasn’t gin, a drink for which there was an unstoppable craze in the first half of the century. In 1726, there were 6,287 places in London where gin was sold, much of it rasping with turpentine or sulphuric acid. If the adulteration of wine was common, the adulteration of spirits was commoner. In the history of distilling, adulteration is the rule, not the exception. The trade had always been rife with diluters, “artificial Rectifiers,” and “sophisticators,” who would draw brandy from a turnip, or “meliorate” spirits with green vitriol.33 During the gin craze, the desire of the poor for penny drams of hooch drove both licit and black market distillers to fabricate “gin” from whatever grain and flavourings they could get. Wine was only sometimes poisonous. Even when pure, gin was a kind of poison, “Mother’s Ruin” as the anti-gin campaigners insisted—a drug that got into the milk of babies through their drunken nurses, or turned women to depravity and men to disorder.34 By the Gin Act of 1736, the British state even attempted—unsuccessfully—to ban gin. By contrast with this juniper-sodden firewater, wine seemed a moderate drink. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith looked enviously to the wine-drinking nations of Europe as being soberer than Britain.
Many wise voices over the ages told the English that they would be better off drinking fruit wines made from native British fruits than fancy—and often faked—foreign wines. Sir Hugh Platt, an Elizabethan courtier, beseeched his contemporaries to take an “English and naturall drinke” made from Royston grapes instead of poisoning themselves with imported “concocted” wines.35 “Native” fruit wines were one of Accum’s passions, too. Yet this could not be the whole answer, because swindled wines were for sale too in France and Italy, where they were native. The truth is that until the process of wine making was itself more reliable, there would always be a large volume of ropy wines; and ropy wines led inexorably to fraud. Legislation could try to protect the consumer and the revenue from fraud, but the chances of success were not good, until reliable wine making was the norm.
“The best test against adulterated wine is a perfect acquaintance with that which is good,” wrote the wine expert Cyrus Redding in 1833.36 He was thinking of British consumers, whose palates were often so numbed by alcohol that they could not tell when their port was “cut” with spirits or when their claret was fake. Merchants in Bordeaux knew that when they were selling to the English market, they could get away with mixing their wines with 10 percent benicolo, a cheap, alcoholic Spanish plonk, because English wine drinkers didn’t know the difference.37 Yet, increasingly, the French consumer was not much better off. Things had to get very bad in French wine production, in the nineteenth century, before they could get better. There was an explosion of new substances that became a part of wine making: sulphuric acid to give wines a little sharpness, “allume” added to fix the colour in falsely coloured wines, salicylic acid to stop fermentation, iron sulphate to even out the taste.38 Suddenly, it was hard to know on what basis to judge wine quality. Previously, taste had seemed enough, but these new chemical substances “rendered these traditional criteria obsolete.”39 Then, in the 1880s, phylloxera hit, the tiny root-feeding aphid that wiped out almost 2.5 million hectares of vineyard in France. Vines were also affected by mildew. Phylloxera, it has been said, led to “a notable increase in dishonesty,” especially in the mid-1880s.40 The shortage of real grapes meant that vignerons were forced to desperate measures. Vast amounts of raisins were imported from Greece to Marseilles to fabricate raisin wines, labelled as the real thing. And “wines” were even sold that had no vine product in them at all, just chemicals, sugar, and water.
Both wine-makers and the French state recognized a desperate need to set new norms for wine making, to find new definitions of what “wine” actually was. Special new laws were passed dealing with adulteration. In 1889, raisin wines were specifically outlawed; in 1891, the practice of “chalking” was prohibited; in 1894, it was forbidden to sell either watered-down wines or wines laced with extra alcohol.41 In the meantime, Louis Pasteur had began to establish the science that would finally enable reliable avoidance of some of the most common failings in wine, without recourse to swindling. In the 1860s, Pasteur identified many of the microorganisms that caused different faults in the bottle. An excess bitterness was due to degraded glycerol; flabbiness was caused by a polysaccharide. In Pasteur’s view, “yeast makes wine, bacteria destroy it.” This was the foundation of modern oenology. It would take several decades before Pasteur’s bacteriology was fully applied in the vineyard, but at last there was now the means available for scientific wine making.
In 1905, the French government issued a new law on wine quality, defining wine as the product of “fresh grapes.” This was a start, but many fraudulent wines were still being marketed, and there were numerous examples of generic wine being labelled as if it came from one of the prestigious wine regions such as Burgundy. Ultimately, it was not prohibition by itself but enhanced standards of wine making that resolved the problem. The Appellation Contrôlée system, which evolved in the 1920s with Châteauneuf-du-Pape but was officially established in 1935, laid out extremely detailed rules for every stage of the wine-making process, drawing on new expertise in oenology. Appellation Contrôlée is fundamentally a system of geographical control, according to which “Bordeaux,” for example, must come from the region of that name and nowhere else. But AC also set rules about vine varieties, pruning and training methods, alcoholic strength, and the quality of the grapes used.
Wine bearing the “AOC” mark on its label, a guarantee that the wine has been produced under strict conditions of quality control and within a defined geographical area.
The sy
stem was not without teething troubles. Attempts to define which region was allowed to produce which wine could lead to bitter disagreement, as in Champagne, where there were riots over the question of whether the nearby Aube region was allowed to produce true “champagne” (in 1927 it was decided that it was). But for all its rigidity and arbitrariness, most wine-makers found the new system attractive, since it protected them from unwanted imitators and kept market prices high. The system required higher-level policing than that required by a simple ban on adulteration—the French Service de la Répression des Fraudes still does spot checks to make sure that a Médoc really is what it says, and not some clever imitation. For consumers, the AC and AOC marks—which have now been extended to foods as well as wine—were, and are, a guarantee of quality. They are based not just on the avoidance of the bad, but on knowledge of the good—a knowledge that has extended from producers to consumers.