A decades-long economic crisis plagued small vintners in the early part of the nineteenth century. This crisis was largely brought forth by consecutive poor harvests and lack of access to capital among peasant winemakers. Desperation forced thousands of vintners, particularly from the Mosel River Region, to sell off all of their possessions or emigrate. At the same time, activists within viticultural regions worked tirelessly to combat the crisis by improving the overall processes and quality of German wines. One such social activist, Ludwig Gall, had managed to find a way to help struggling vintners by diminishing the role that Nature played in one of the world's most northerly wine regions.
Plainly put, Gall’s technique—as well as those of others—enabled ordinary vintners to produce decent wine from unripe grapes and less than outstanding vintages by way of chemical manipulation. By 1850 the great wine estates of the Rheingau, including that of Prince von Metternich, were challenged by peasant winemakers who had learned to profit from these advances in chemistry and the burgeoning field of oenology. The price of wine as well as once expensive vineyards bottomed-out as cheap wines made from these chemical processes entered the market. While Gall’s process did indeed bring life to the struggling peasant vintner, it had the secondary effect (intended or unintended) of diminishing the value of long-established wine estates which were more often than not in the hands of a powerful and conservative class of agricultural elites.
A fiery backlash amongst producers of “natural” wines sought to crush this underworld of “artificial” winemakers. Lawmakers were perplexed because the delicate needs of the viticultural elite had to be balanced with the crushing poverty of those that had been forced to produce “artificial” wines. Various associations of small vintners, estate owners, and wine merchants were formed to prop up their position in the Weinfrage. On the Mosel, where artificial winemaking had taken the greatest hold, a small but powerful group of “natural” winemakers sought to chase artificial winemakers from their own backyards.
I argue that this crisis, and the ensuing debates that it had triggered, helped form the core of our modern tasting vocabulary. “Natural” or “pure” wine was never a consideration until “artificial” wine had become so threatening. Large estate owners learned to market their wines as having tasting characteristics stemming from a specific source or place (terroir); something that artificially-made wines could not compete with. In the end, while winemaking reflected modern science in the nineteenth century, it was the old world of viticultural elites that would invent our modern sense of taste.