Label
All
0
Clear all filters

Pasteur and the Beginnings of a Scientific Understanding of Wine

Appears in
On Food and Cooking

By Harold McGee

Published 2004

  • About

In 1863 the French Emperor Louis Napoleon asked the great chemist Louis Pasteur to study the “maladies” of wine. Three years later, Pasteur published the landmark Etudes sur le vin. Pasteur and others had already demonstrated that yeast is a living mass of microbes, and thus had made it possible to begin to identify and control the kinds of microbes that both make wine and spoil it. But Pasteur was the first to analyze the development of wine, to discover the central role of oxygen, and show why both barrel and bottle were indispensable for making good wine, the barrel for providing oxygen to the young wine to help mature it, and the bottle for excluding oxygen from the mature wine to help preserve it.

Become a Premium Member to access this page

  • Unlimited, ad-free access to hundreds of the world’s best cookbooks

  • Over 150,000 recipes with thousands more added every month

  • Recommended by leading chefs and food writers

  • Powerful search filters to match your tastes

  • Create collections and add reviews or private notes to any recipe

  • Swipe to browse each cookbook from cover-to-cover

  • Manage your subscription via the My Membership page

Download on the App Store
Pre-register on Google Play

Monthly plan

Annual plan

Part of

The licensor does not allow printing of this title