feature / then and now / Wine in the French Revolution


At the level of political culture, there seems to have been an attempt to portray wine as a beverage that united French citizens. We are 100 years before the time that wine was officially designated the national beverage of France, but that was the import of Revolutionary policy


Citizen Gentil, who proposed a new way of making wine, promoted his wines as not only good quality but healthy: “They will be sought after by the inhabitants of the north, where they work effectively on the nerves, strengthen the stomach, help digestion, revive the spirits, and increase the flow of blood in regions that are very cold and damp.” He foresaw a good market in Russia, “where they drink our wines as we drink water, and our eau-de-vie as we drink wine.” Because it would travel well by land or water, his wine would be sought after in the Midi and America because people will be assured that it reaches them with all its character intact.19 Health also came into play when prestigious vineyards belonging to the Church were sold from 1790 onward. There were ideological problems in asking the high prices that these properties deserved; their value lay not simply in their size and number of vines but in the fact that they produced wines considered very fine and that had therefore commanded high prices during the Old Regime. They were wines that only the wealthy could afford, but how could the Revolutionary authorities convey that—and realize the value of the property—without referring to the wines in terms that were no longer acceptable? A case in point was the 1793 prospectus for the La Romanée


vineyard. It was described as “having the most advantageous [location] for the perfect ripening of the grapes; higher to the west than the east, it receives the first rays of the sun in all seasons, being thus imbued with the strength of the greatest heat of the day.” As for the wine, it was “the most excellent of all those of the Côte d’Or and even of all the vineyards of the French Republic.” It had a “brilliant and velvety color, its ardor and its aroma charm all the senses.” If well kept, it was at its best in its eighth or tenth year. Did this mean it was a delicious wine that appealed to the refined palates of the wealthy? No, it was a healthy—indeed a life-prolonging—wine: “It is then a balm for the elderly, the weak, and the disabled, and it will restore life to the dying.”20 Wines from that vineyard might not have found their way to the glasses and goblets of the masses, but the fundamental aim of the Revolutionary authorities in Burgundy was to provide an adequate supply of decent-quality, healthy wine at an affordable price. In December 1793, all the Gamay wine available in and around Beaune was requisitioned to supply the city.21


Gamay, which was widely planted in Burgundy,


despite Duke Philip’s 1395 ordinance, was considered vin commun, a good wine even though inferior to the vin fin made from Pinot Noir. Gamay vines were far higher-yielding than Pinot Noir, making Gamay less expensive, and more barrels of Gamay wine were requisitioned for the city and for billeted soldiers in 1794 and 1795 and later in the decade.22


124 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023 Wine was clearly a staple of military rations and of diet


more generally, such that people expected to be able to drink it regularly. Beer was very much an outsider in wine-producing regions such as Burgundy; in 1798, when the Beaune municipal council calculated its anticipated tax revenues from alcoholic beverages, it based them on the consumption of 14,000 275-liter barrels of wine and 200 138-liter barrels of beer.23


The next


year, the wine estimate was up by a thousand barrels, to 15,000. Consumption at this level meant that each of Beaune’s 10,000 inhabitants—women, men, and children—had access to 413 liters of wine a year, more than a liter a day. Subtract the likely 40 percent of the population that was under 19 years of age, and each adult had access to almost 2 liters of wine a day.


From bien national to vin national


As if to emphasize the importance of wine in Burgundy, people rejected alternatives. In 1793, the Minister of War let anyone in Burgundy providing accommodation for volunteer soldiers to supply them with cider or beer rather than wine because the 1792 harvest had been small and wine prices were high. But he was forced to reverse the decision when he was told that substituting cider or beer for wine would “result in disturbances on the part of National Volunteers who wanted their hosts to provide them only with wine.”24


Wine might have been a staple, but it was a distant second


to grain. There are plenty of examples of grain and bread riots in 18th-century France, but wine riots seem to have been few and far between, if they occurred at all. One was threatened at Martigues, the now-picturesque village near Marseille, in 1793. The local Popular Society warned that if the wine supply ran out before the next harvest, there could be “a general uprising” by fishermen, who relied on it while at sea.25 If the aim of Revolutionary governments was to achieve a standard of good-quality wine by ridding markets of fine wines and poor wines, there was no pretense that all wines were the same quality and no effort to make all vignerons sell all their wine at a standard price. As difficult as it might have been to acknowledge during the more radical phases of the Revolution, inequalities of wealth persisted, and there were people willing to pay more for wines from prestigious districts or regions—the sort of people who paid high prices for expropriated vineyards. The price controls implemented in 1793 made clear distinctions among the wine-producing villages of Burgundy: top-quality red wines from Volnay and Pommard were priced at 560 to 570 livres per queue (a barrel of 456 liters), while wines from Savigny were capped at 340 livres, and those from Monthelie at 250 livres. All those wines were made from Pinot Noir. Wines that were a blend of Pinot Noir and Gamay were priced at a maximum of 200 livres a queue, while wines made from Gamay alone were capped at 180 livres.26 At the level of political culture, however, there seems to have been an attempt to portray wine as a beverage that overrode distinctions of wealth and occupation and that united French citizens. We are 100 years before the time that wine was officially designated the national beverage of France, but that was the import of Revolutionary policy. Wine flowed freely at the various festivals sponsored by the Revolutionary state—the events that replaced the host of religious festivals, feast days, and saints’ days of the Old Regime that were occasions of deep drinking as much as (if not more than) profound piety.


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