Food and Foodways, 19:294–313, 2011

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0740-9710 print / 1542-3484 online
DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2011.630615

Acidity and Power: The Politics of Natural Wine

in Nineteenth-Century Germany

KEVIN D. GOLDBERG
Cogut Center for the Humanities, and the Department of German Studies, Brown University,
Providence, Rhode Island, USA

This article examines the origins of the natural-wine movement in

Germany—the first of its kind in Europe—by exploring the cru-
cial technological and social developments which prompted the
use of derided “artificial” winemaking techniques. The forgotten
social reformer Ludwig Gall, once known to as the “savoir of the
small vintner,” helped to relieve the unreliable dependency of wine-
growers on nature by perfecting a deacidification technique which
allowed for pleasant wines in any vintage. While Gall’s technique
became an important part of the road out of impoverishment for
many winegrowers in the Mosel River Valley, it had the additional
effect of challenging the static nature of the wine trade and the
monopolies and economic efficiencies of large landowners. By out-
lining the initial uses of Gall’s technique and the opposition to it,
this article reveals the formative debates in the ongoing contro-
versy over the definition of natural wine. In turn, the concepts of
“artificial” and “natural” are shown to be grounded more in the
social and political spheres of the nineteenth-century German wine
trade and less in matters of consumer choice or concerns over the
environment.

Generous financial support for this article was provided by the German Academic Ex-
change Service (DAAD) and the Center for European Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley. Claudia Schmitt at the Kreisarchiv Bernkastel-Wittlich, Sabine Muth at the Wein-
bau Forschungsanstalt in Geisenheim, and Reiner Nolden at the Stadtarchiv in Trier were very
helpful in finding sources and answering questions. I would also like to thank the anonymous
reviewers at this journal and the Department of History at UCLA for a wonderful environment
in which to write this article.
Address correspondence to Kevin D. Goldberg, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown
University, P.O. Box 1979, 190 Hope St., Providence, RI 02912. E-mail: kevin goldberg@
brown.edu

294
 Acidity and Power 295

In his turn-of-the-century cellar diary the British professor and wine col-
lector George Saintsbury noted “after 1870 the general curse of insincerity,
overreachingness and fraud, which even such a prophet of prophets . . . as
Nietzsche recognized as hanging on Germany, attacked with particular fe-
rocity the banks of the Moselle . . . the wines of Ausonius’ favourite river
have long had a deserved reputation for flowery flavour; unfortunately, they
have—of late years and even decades—acquired another, also well deserved
but much less enviable, as being the most abominably ‘faked’ of all real or
pretended juices of the grape.”1 Saintsbury was hardly alone in his depic-
tion of Mosel wines as fraudulent or “faked.”2 The Chamber of Commerce
in Cologne, one of the most important trading centers for German wines,
asserted that the 1873 vintage hardly contained any growths without added
sugar, and that most vintners had been forced to dilute the astringent acidity
with the addition of water.3 By the start of the First World War, the Mosel’s
reputation as a breeding ground for artificial wines became so entrenched
that the Reichstag was pressured to pass multiple laws against the adulter-
ation of wine, the most rigorous of their kind at the time.4
Wine adulteration was hardly a novel vinicultural idea in the mid-
nineteenth century, but, because of increased demand and changing tech-
nologies, it had taken on new forms in the industrializing era.5 Frederic
Accum, one of the earliest critics of chemical additives in foods, pointed out
that it was “sufficiently obvious, that few of those commodities, which are
the objects of commerce, are adulterated to a greater extent than wine.”6
Although the older and poisonous forms of adulteration Accum had in mind
began to dwindle by mid-century, the new manipulative techniques, though
physically benign, were no less controversial. Innovative winemaking prac-
tices such as acid dilution and the boosting of alcohol gave peasant vintners
and urban merchants more control over the production process, but also,
intentionally or not, rattled the existing social hierarchies of the established
wine trade.7 The repercussions of the ensuing debates about the purity of
wine extended deep into the fabric of German politics, as well as helped
to define European and even American conceptions of natural and artificial
foods.8
The 19th century image as the “golden age of food falsification” has
led, particularly in the past decade, to an abundance of food and drink
scholarship.9 Similar to today’s confusion over authentic and organic food
cultures, 19th century understandings of what constituted natural or artificial
was equally perplexing, and probably more politicized.10 Although wine has
not featured at the center of research on food adulteration, historians have
been keen to point out its inclusion within a broader context, especially in
the case of France, where vineyard diseases, urbanization, and the interna-
tionalization of the French economy are seen as having fueled the trade in
manipulated wines.11 In Germany, the amount of debate on artificial and
natural winemaking methods outnumbered contemporaneous discussions
296 K. D. Goldberg

on vine pests, including the famous phylloxera, but historians have proven
negligent or unaware. This has to do, in part, with the compartmentalization
of German history into teleological political blocks, in which the 1870s, the
decade when the German nation was founded, is also treated as the usual
starting point for German discussions of food adulteration. A problem arises,
however, because the battle over natural and artificial wine had been rag-
ing for at least two solid decades by German unification and was already
reaching its first crucial turning point; the entrance of the national state into
the debate. The involvement of the Imperial Health Department as well as
shadowy consumer associations and private food monitoring agencies in the
1870s made for a far different playing field than the one occupied almost ex-
clusively with desperate vintners, anxious merchants, and protectionist elites
in the 1840s and 1850s.12
By examining the so-called artificial wine question (Kunstweinfrage) in
mid-19th century Germany, this article sheds light on the political and so-
cial construction of natural and artificial as victual categories. I argue that
the social and viticultural deficiencies of the Mosel River Valley, compared
with other German wine regions, was rectified, in part, by the spread of
deacidification techniques popularized by the social reformer Ludwig Gall.
The products of these new winemaking techniques were immediately struck
down as artificial in spite of there being no clear way to test or taste for
manipulation. In response to the industrializing forces of German vinicul-
ture, landed elites began defining their wines as “natural,” buttressed by the
suspect premise that their products had been provided by nature, unaltered
by man. The importance, however, lies in the malleability and politicization
of the “essentialized” categories of natural and artificial. Further, although it
is tempting to view these elites as stoic reactionaries, this misses the larger
point related to product innovation in the food trades.13 It was these same
elites who, in Germany, first used the term natural as a tool with which to
differentiate, discuss, and attract buyers to their wines.14 In doing so, they
laid the groundwork for the phenomenon of terroir, which came to embody
later discourses of fine wine.15
The Mosel River Valley, a winding stretch of vine-clad hillsides between
Trier and Koblenz in western Germany, was wine adulteration’s epicenter,
at least in perception. The region’s engagement with artificially improved
wines was the result of a catastrophic set of circumstances, including sky-
rocketing food prices, partible inheritance, generous population growth, and
untimely political developments. To these factors, which have been explored
at least tangentially elsewhere, we must add the excessive acidity of Mosel
wines compared with those from Germany’s more southerly and warmer
viticultural areas, where grape ripeness (and thus the amount of acidity)
was generally less problematic. However, as we will see, it would be wrong
to assume that modern adulteration techniques found no application else-
where in Germany, as they were implemented by vintners everywhere to
 Acidity and Power 297

offset weak vintages. The decision by many winegrowers and merchants

to adopt these new cellar techniques in order to reduce their wines’ acid-
ity was often based on quite serious matters—sometimes related to their
own survival. Not until the middle decades of the 19th century, however,
when successive poor vintages intensified the destitution and impoverish-
ment of German vintners—particularly on the Mosel—did the strategic cellar
innovations of the social reformer Ludwig Gall finally address the link be-
tween a wine’s acidity level and a winegrower’s survival.

BACKGROUND

The need for rational improvements (Verbesserungen) in Mosel vineyards

and cellars was recognized in the 18th century. In 1787, the last archbishop
of Trier, Clemens Wensezlaus, decreed that inferior Kleinberger vines be
dug up and replaced with hardier and more palatable grapes, such as Ries-
ling. This decree stemmed in part from the success of Riesling in other
German territories, notably the Rheingau, which produced Germany’s most
famous and expensive wines at the time.16 This was the start of what Felix
Meyer considered the gradual improvement of grape and wine culture on
the Mosel.17 Not until the Napoleonic occupation of the Mosel River Val-
ley did genuine progressive change garner any momentum among estate
owners and wealthy winegrowers.18 But small vintners struggled to make
costly qualitative improvements, including the decreed planting of Riesling
vines, as they lacked the capital to purchase new equipment and labor. In
many cases, even their own conservative business sense prevailed over the
progressive forces of change.
Following the collapse of the French occupation, the Mosel River Valley
was annexed to Prussia in 1815 as part of its newly created Rhine Province.
This was for many bureaucrats in Berlin their first foray into serious viticul-
ture, largely an alien concept to Prussian administrators. This unfamiliarity
would have to be rectified quickly, as significant segments of the popula-
tion along the Mosel River were employed in wine production. In certain
medium-sized villages such as Zeltingen the percentage of people working in
the wine trade was for all intents and purposes 100 percent.19 In spite of the
relative inexperience of Prussian administrators, their first years witnessed
an upwards qualitative shift in the production of wine, and the beneficiaries
of the previous decades’ secularization and land auctions took advantage of
a freed market to make wine with an eye towards quality.20
Beginning in 1818, Mosel winegrowers benefited from their tariff-free
inclusion in the enormous Prussian wine market while all foreign wines
(meaning not only French, Italian, and Spanish, but also wines from the
non-Prussian German regions of Württemberg, Hessen, Franken, Baden, and
Bavaria) were assessed a tax on their entrance into Prussia and then taxed
298 K. D. Goldberg

again on their sale. This prohibitive tax on foreign wines gave Mosel vintners
an edge on the domestic market, including in the populous North German
cities. As a result of the tariffs on foreign growths, the prices of many Mosel
wines hit all-time highs by the end of 1818.21 Merchants looked to the Mosel
for quaffable table wines to replace the now more expensive French and
South German options, but the overly confident Mosel vintners, large and
small, looked to increase profit not by improving quality but rather spending
less and producing more. The next decade proved to be a boon for the
majority of Mosel vintners, but the short-lived windfall soon dissipated at
the hands of the same Prussian politicians who had inadvertently created
it.22 The expansion of the Prussian tariff-free boundaries to include other
German wine regions, beginning in 1828, created enormous price and quality
pressure on Mosel vintners and would help spur the economic crisis that
ravaged on the Mosel during the next three decades.23
Following the untimely conclusion of their monopoly on the Prussian
market, the entire Mosel region—uniquely dependent on a monoculture of
grape growing—sank into a deep economic depression that lasted until the
late 1850s. As market demand for Mosel wines dried up, unsold barrels sat in
the cellars of vintners and merchants, while prices for ordinary foodstuffs, in-
cluding rye and potatoes, rose sharply.24 Vintners were unable to make pay-
ments on vineyard acquisitions that they rashly made in the booming 1820s.
It is hardly a coincidence that of all the Prussian provinces (Regierungs-
bezirken), Trier, which included the Mosel River Valley, accounted for the
largest number of emigrants during 1845–1859.25 Beginning in the late 1830s
and continuing well into the 1840s, small and medium-sized vintners took
part in foreclosure sales at which they sold off their cellared wine for rock-
bottom prices, and when their cellars were dry, they unloaded their personal
possessions. Conversely, vintners in non-Prussian territory benefited from
the expansion of the tariff boundaries because their wines now entered the
lucrative North German market without onerous taxation.26
Other factors beyond the expanded tariff boundaries put pressure on
Mosel vintners. In 1842, an astute young editor for the Rheinische Zeitung
named Karl Marx—himself a lover of wine, whose father owned a vineyard
along a tributary of the Mosel—noted how Prussian authorities regarded
cries of distress among Mosel winegrowers not as anything serious but as
an “insolent shrieking.”27 A free and open press, Marx declared, was needed
for an honest evaluation. Within the entire spectrum of Prussian classes and
occupations, according to Marx, small vintners were voiceless and powerless.
Though without much immediate success, Marx attempted to lend a voice
to these distressed vintners while the overall crisis continued to deepen in
the mid and late 1840s.
The revolutionary turmoil of 1848–1849 was especially traumatic for
Mosel vintners. Even though the region was largely agricultural, pockets
within many of the River’s villages were surprisingly democratic in their
 Acidity and Power 299

political outlook. The region’s close proximity to France, and in fact its
former status as a Napoleonic territory, helped to harbor anti-conservative
and anti-Prussian ideals. Minor skirmishes along the Mosel were responses
to the perceived damage imparted to vintners by distant lawmakers—both
conservative and liberal. The grape must tax was denounced for reducing
the entire region from “the heights of unparalleled affluence to the depths of
a universal impoverishment.”28 Trouble seemed to strike Mosel winegrowers
from all directions.
A significant catalyst for the increasingly politicized nature of Mosel
vintners in the late 1840s was the sheer extent of the agricultural difficulties.
By 1850, the region’s crisis had been counted in decades, not years. Inces-
sant poor harvests due to erratic weather—then the single most important
factor in determining the quality of wine—forced vintners into the credit
market while they prayed for a quality vintage. The lack of agricultural self-
sufficiency among vintners brought on annual “bread debts” for most small
winegrowing families.29 The region’s relatively egalitarian rural environment,
while certainly freer than that of the famed East Elbian Junker estates, was
for most, nevertheless, an “equality of poverty.”30 Many began to recognize
that lowered tariffs on foreign wines, censorship, and Prussian stubbornness
all contributed to their destitution, but it was still the poor quality of Mosel
wines that mattered most.

SOUR GRAPES

Wine experts have long known that differences in soil, climate, and grape
varieties have a considerable effect on the taste of wine. Terms such as “taste
of the earth” (Erdgeschmack) and “taste of the ground” (Grundgeschmack)
have been used for centuries to describe the effects that soil and other local
indicators impart on wine.31 Regrettably for Mosel producers, if their wines
had a defining characteristic among nineteenth-century drinkers, it was their
astringent acidity. Karl Graff wrote in 1821 that “it is unfortunately only too
true that Mosel wines compare unfavorably with those from other German
wine regions. The cause of this is easy to uncover. Aside from the noteworthy
wines that come from the Middle Mosel, there is a terrible mass of Mosel wine
that originates from around Trier and Coblenz . . . which no doubt damage
the reputation of all Mosel wines among non-experts. In this mass of wine
there is an excess of acidity in an unpleasant sense of the word which is
so predominant that even in the best vintages they cannot be sweetened
by nature.”32 Johann Philipp Bronner, perhaps the most erudite scholar of
German wines in the early and mid nineteenth century, felt compelled to
reveal the cruel truth about the majority of the Mosel’s wines: “If we praise
the distinctive Riesling that grows along certain parts of the Mosel . . . we
must then recognize that the greatest share of Mosel wine remains simply a
sour drink.” In discussing the poet Heinrich von Kleist’s rather inexplicable
300 K. D. Goldberg

affinity for Mosel wines, Bronner joked “the great poet sings so highly of
Mosel wine, but when he came to first visit the Mosel directly from the
Rheingau and Nahe regions, his pampered palate could hardly have been
ready for its less than stellar growths.”33
By the middle of the nineteenth century, chemists had been able to
quantify acid content in wines, which only served to prove already existing
suspicions. In an 1853 paper presented to the Royal Society of London, Henry
Bence Jones measured the acidity, sweetness, and alcohol levels of the eight
types of wine imported most into England. Mosel wines, on average, had
the highest acidity levels of any wine from the continent. The average range
of acidity levels in Mosel wines tallied 10 percent higher than the second
highest region, Burgundy. The high range of acidity in Mosel wines was
20 percent higher than those from the adjoining Rhine. Conversely, Mosel
wines had the lowest alcohol content of the group. Generally an indicator
of ripeness, the highest range for alcohol content in Mosel wines was a
stunning 28 percent less than the highest range in Rhine wines!34
The right level of acidity was the most important component of a wine,
including alcohol, in determining the price paid per bottle. In 1841, Dr.
Lüdersdorf of the Royal Prussian General Economic College compiled statis-
tics of various wines, including their acid content, alcohol content, and ex-
tract levels, and then listed them side by side with the current price per
bottle in Berlin. The findings would have come as a shock to those who
had thought a direct relationship existed between alcohol and price. In fact,
Lüdersdorf showed that acidity was the largest determinant of price. Of the
eighteen wines tested, the two which had the highest acidity levels sold
for the lowest price per bottle. Lüdersdorf demonstrated that an ideal acid-
ity range existed at which there tended to be a marked spike in price per
bottle.35 A similar evaluation was undertaken by Prof. Dr. Hlubeck for wines
from the Steiermark region of Austria. In this case, there is an even more
direct link between acidity and price among the twelve wines included in
the experiment. The three wines with the lowest acidity sold for the three
highest prices. At the other end of the spectrum, the three wines with the
highest acid contents sold for the lowest prices.36 Evidence continued to
mount in support of the idea that consumers demanded wines that were not
overly acidic, a fact that did not bode well for the majority of producers on
the Mosel.

THE SAVOIR OF THE SMALL VINTNER

If winegrowers could not find a way to overcome natural disadvantages,

then at least they could find a way to circumnavigate nature’s ill effects. This
was the task that the part-time scientist and part-time social reformer Ludwig
Gall (1791–1863) set for himself. Although largely forgotten today, Gall had
 Acidity and Power 301

once been dubbed the “first German Socialist,” and any evaluation of his
work justifies this ambitious claim.37 Originally from the northwest german
city of Aldenhoven in the former Duchy of Jülich, Gall became intimately
familiar with the Mosel crisis through his marriage into a Trier winegrow-
ing family. Gall was a determined and educated reformer in the mold of
Saint-Simon who had spent time abroad in Hungary and Pennsylvania.38
Throughout his life, he penned dozens of pieces relating to various social is-
sues including poverty, emigration, speculators, and most significantly—the
Mosel wine crisis. Much of his agricultural writing is dedicated to the plight
of the impoverished vintner and the increasing split between a struggling
peasant class and an indolent landowning class. As a relatively privileged
observer of rural plight, Gall was convinced that he understood the causes
behind poverty and suffering. He vowed not to remain “an indifferent ob-
server,” but rather to use his position of power to reduce the horrors of
the disadvantaged.39 In his efforts to alleviate the poverty for besieged Mosel
winegrowers, Gall—perhaps unwittingly—stumbled upon a larger discovery.
He had found a way to offset nature’s misfortune on the Mosel.40
Ludwig Gall believed that Mosel viticulture could be saved if vintners
found a way to produce wines, regardless of actual climatic conditions, that
reflected the taste of a healthy vintage. Turning his theory into practice, Gall
perfected a method in which, by adding a calculated sugar-water solution
to the pre-fermented grape must, the post-fermentation wine would look,
smell and taste like a quality wine from a very good vintage. Later dubbed
Gallisierung, Gall’s invention turned wines that would have normally been
overly acidic and sour-tasting into balanced wines. The addition of the sugar-
water solution, contrary to the obvious assumption, does not necessarily
increase the actual sweetness of the wine but rather dilutes the naturally
high acidity levels (thus giving the impression of added sweetness) and
usually helps to elongate the fermentation of sugar into alcohol. With this
method the winemaker was no longer completely dependent on the whims
of sunshine, soil, and rainfall but was now in control of his own winemaking
fate. In addition, consumers were no longer tied to the vagaries of the annual
harvest, but instead were closer to a consistent product year after year.
Gall began marketing his method in earnest around 1850 in the midst of
the viticultural crisis. Less than two decades later, the fate of many Mosel
winemakers had been reversed. The reputation of Mosel wines, once on
the brink of death, was soon catalyzed by award-winning showings at the
London Exhibition of 1862 and the Paris Exhibition of 1867.
Writing before and during Marx’s early career, Gall’s language was re-
markably similar to the more famous Moselaner. Gall wrote “I have placed
the task before myself of freeing the small vintner, the unluckiest of the dis-
advantaged classes, from the forced servitude that money has, unfortunately,
held them to.”41 Gall stressed that the vintners’ work is enormously difficult,
and unlike other farmers, they are without the assistance of animals. Mosel
302 K. D. Goldberg

vineyards were notoriously steep and dangerous, particularly when ice blan-
keted the ground at harvest. The costs of fertilizing, spiking and binding
the vines, draining water, and building protective walls were substantially
more than most small vintners could afford. Gall pointed out that no matter
the effort that a vintner put into his labor, poor weather at harvest could
ruin the entire vintage as it did in nine of the ten years leading up to 1854.
Vintners were then forced into the hands of speculators, whose grip they
were unlikely to break.
Gall’s initial aim in his Practical Instructions (Praktische Anleitung) was
to separate fact from fiction in discussing the origins of the Mosel wine crisis.
Tolls, taxes, speculators, and competition from the southern German states
were all challenges, but they did not get to the root of the problem. The
reason why Mosel wine struggled to find a market was simple: “Our few
terrific wines are only affordable for the rich, and even our decent table
wine accessible only to the high middle class. The greater half of our pro-
duction is so sour and thus worthless that it only finds its way to the poorest
classes merely as a surrogate for apple wine or beer.”42 For this inability
to produce and sell decent wine, there was plenty of blame to go around.
“While everything around us roars forward and in all branches of business
the progress of science is being made valid, the business of winegrowing
in Germany, with only a few exceptions, is in the hands of ignorant labor-
ers who remain blind slaves of convention, habit, and prejudice.”43 Science
and technology, for Gall, could have socially advantageous benefits which
contained the possibility of offsetting inequalities.
This extended into the realm of viniculture, where methods for improv-
ing wine should be welcomed, according to Gall. The reasoning behind
employing the sugar-water solution was simple; improving the taste of the
wine was tantamount to easing the economic depression of small wine-
growers. Gall was convinced that “the times when man calls improvement
(Verbesserung) of the wine a falsification (Verfälschung) of the wine lay be-
hind us. It is nonsense to claim that nature must provide everything. Wine
is as other foods, which are not provided in a finished state directly from
nature, but only made so through the assistance of man . . . nature offers to
us from our vineyards not wine, but only grapes, which even in a completely
ripe condition are still not finished. They only contain the necessary material
for winemaking.”44 It is up to man to finish the job. Gall advocated a pro-
cess in which nothing would be added to the must that the grape did not
already contain, namely sugar and water. He also stressed that the solution
be added before fermentation, meaning before the actual wine is created.
After all, as Gall rhetorically asked, what if Henry VII had heeded the advice
of London’s merchant class in 1509 and deemed the use of hops in beer as
an illegal falsification? Instead, centuries later, hops had become a “natural”
component of beer, and the increasing consumption of it in Germany had
helped contribute to the impoverishment of the winegrowing regions.45
 Acidity and Power 303

Gallisierung, coinciding with a general decline in food prices, quickly

appeared to be a ticket out of impoverishment on the Mosel. By the mid-
1850s, praise for Gall was ringing strong and loud across Germany. The
Kölnische Zeitung reported in 1853 that “the future belonged to Gall,” as
four distinguished officials at the Bonn Country Fair had heaped uncondi-
tional praise on his method. Dr. Kaufmann, Professor of Economics at the
University of Bonn, lauded Gall as a “representative of truth, science, and
progress.”46 Supporters of Gall spoke of him in almost superhuman terms:
“Gall is able to accomplish what nature cannot. If the sun was not warm
enough to create a balanced wine, Gall can still bring the grape’s main
components—sugar, acid, and water—into proper form.”47 An occasional
insert in the Trierische Zeitung, edited by Gall himself, titled “The Newest
and Most Useful,” published dozens of letters from vintners who had used
Gall’s method with success. One letter described using the older “Chap-
tal’sche” method (addition of sugar) with varying degrees of success, but
only since beginning Gall’s method (addition of sugar plus dilution of acid
with water) had the vintner begun to produce top quality wines.48 Other
letters addressed the overcoming of doubt among vintners as well as its
relative ease of use. In fact, it became evident that more than just Mosel
winegrowers were benefitting from Gall’s technique, as letters came in from
the Rheingau, Rheinhessen, Switzerland, and elsewhere.49 The success and
expansion of Gallisierung could also be seen in the construction of three
new sugar factories in the Rhineland shortly after 1850.50

DECANTING THE OPPOSITION

When the Gallisierung message began to pick up steam in the 1850s, its
opponents were not yet unified in a solid front against the perceived threat.
Nevertheless, Gall had held at least a vague idea of who the enemies of
the poor farmers and Mosel vintners were. In his short but spirited 1835
essay, My Wants and My Effects, Gall outlined a simple scheme of modern
social relations: “The financially privileged classes and the working classes
stand as sharp contrasts to one another; the situation of the former improves
in obverse proportion to which the situation of the latter becomes more
and more impaired, lean, and horrific.”51 In 1854, Gall could generalize fur-
ther about the motives of those who opposed Gallisierung: “Our large wine
estate owners and the middlemen between producers and consumers are
biased in their false belief that the multiplication of third class wine will
endanger the reputation, price, and sales of first and second class wines.
Out of sheer egotistical shortsightedness, these groups are continuously at-
tempting to label advancements in winemaking as falsifications, even though
these modern winemaking methods have been used in France and even by
the most intelligent German winemakers for more than fifty years.”52 This
304 K. D. Goldberg

intuitive analysis by Gall proved remarkably accurate as it became increas-

ingly clear that the opposition groups against deacidification were eager to
protect their own interests. Nevertheless, stubborn and strident opposition
came from all angles and seemingly all strata of society.
A few decades after Gallisierung’s introduction on the Mosel, the influ-
ential wine trade publication Die Weinlaube could claim that “no subject of
modern enology has been given to such divergences of opinions and points
of view among lay drinkers and wine experts as the question of improving
the taste of wine through Gall’s method.”53 These differences of opinion
manifested themselves in the multifaceted critiques of Gall. The chemist R.
Wagner chose to emphasize the cultural and economic repercussions of the
deacidification question over its “very secondary” chemical importance in
his report published in the Second Annual Report of Chemical Technology:
“German wines—by which we mean the wines of Franken, the Pfalz, and the
Rheingau—have a historical value based on their absolute purity. In many
cases, these wines are considered luxury articles that sell for higher prices
than their equals from other countries. These high prices are attributable to
the purchase and improvement of land and the necessarily high cost of la-
bor associated with making these wines. In return, the consumer knows that
he is purchasing a pure wine that can keep for a very long time.” Wagner
recognized that deteriorating economic conditions for vintners could wreck
domestic wine production and force winemakers to move toward the fab-
rication of cheap artificial wines like those made via Gall’s technique. But
it was in the interest of the German wine trade, Wagner argued, to enact
laws forcing deacidified wine to be marked and sold as such, so as not to
diminish the image of natural German wine.54 Another alleged side effect of
Gall’s process was the corrosion of the work ethic and industriousness of
Germany’s vintners. H. Böheim of the Pfalz warned of the possibility that
the frequent and intense work of the vintner, including the tying back of
the vines and the often difficult late harvest by hand would no longer be
necessary, as artificial wine, according to Böheim, depended upon the de-
ception of tongues and not the honest work of men.55 The social and cultural
hierarchy of the wine trade, and its static traditions, were too valued to be
dishonored.
For some opponents, their language was couched in terms of expedi-
ency and the argument that the permissibility of deacidification would signify
the start of a slippery slope toward the decline of the purist ideal. Sebastian
Englerth of the Pfalz pointed out that “southern Germany produces from
nature very fine dessert wines, which because of their bouquets and their
age-worthiness are enjoyed both at home and abroad. They are admired and
loved equally among their foreign competition and therefore require no ar-
tificial improvement (künstliche Verbesserung). These wines contain in their
natural purity a mixture of the highest components provided by nature. If an
artificial addition is attempted the wines will certainly lose their true value.”
 Acidity and Power 305

Furthermore, according to Englerth, vintners and farmers are not capable of

putting new technologies to good use. “To improve the lesser-quality wines,
as chemists have managed, it must be done precisely according to the teach-
ings of chemistry. The vintner is thus required to have far more chemical
knowledge of these processes than he is for natural and rational winemak-
ing.” Englerth continued: “If we decide to allow artificial improvement only
for competent winemakers, there will soon appear other participants who
will bring the greatest shame and discredit to vintners and wine merchants.
There are already winemaking factories which seek to artificially improve
great quantities of wine, thereby creating a bridge between improvement
and falsification, thus bringing the original idea of rational-artificial improve-
ment into the realm of affectation (Weinkünstelei), cover-ups (Schmiererei),
and deceit (Betrug).” Besides, Englerth believed “in a moral respect it re-
mains an established fact that the consumer always demands a natural wine,
and that contrary to an artificially ennobled wine, the natural wine always
possesses a high value.” Englerth exhorted German winemakers to avoid
the same mistakes as their French colleagues by deciding against artificial
improvement. He suggested that German wine producers must take as their
motto: “Wine should remain a product of nature, and only through rational
farming, winemaking, and cellaring is it possible to improve.”56
By 1860, Gallisierung, Chaptalization and other controversial forms of
winemaking were not limited to Germany, but were in fact in wide use across
Europe. Key differences existed, however, particularly between Germany
and France, in the way that each viewed and treated the techniques.57 French
winemakers had free rein in terms of sugaring and even de-acidifying their
grape musts. Sugaring was a tradition in France, which in comparison to
Germany, merited practically no objections. The German-language press re-
ported on “colossal establishments” in Cette (today Sète) where grape must
was massively sugared.58 Of particular irony is that while a debate raged
in Germany about the production of allegedly artificial wines, the German
public was voraciously consuming sugared and deacidified French products.
This may have been because, as Heinrich Rickler reported in the Deutsche
Wein-Zeitung, “the French make no spectacle of the business.”59 It appeared
that fighting over the falsification of wine, even by those hoping to ban such
processes, was not helping the overall image of German wine—natural or
artificial.
At the 1846 congress of Wine and Fruit Producers in Heilbronn, Privy
Counselor Mangold of Oehringen (Württemberg) chastised would-be artifi-
cial improvers by challenging their faith and sanctity. “We must trust in our
all mighty God, who in his great inimitable kitchen of nature, through the
powerful effects of the earth and of the alternation of rain with sun, makes
wines each year which may not always be equally good, but nevertheless
always have their own unique characteristics.” The question of artificial im-
provement, for both Mangold and Englerth, led winemakers onto dangerous
306 K. D. Goldberg

ground. Mangold believed that “the more we trust the improving of our
fatherland’s wine to the addition of sugar, alcohol, gypsum, etc., the fur-
ther we remove ourselves from our task of improving wine rationally and
bringing renown to our regions’ pure wines. People with a sweet tooth may
ask for such fabricated wines, not even realizing that it is no longer real
wine. Rather it is a fraud that belongs in the shop of a chemist but not in
our cellars. We must protect our wines’ virginity (Weinkeuschheit) against
such copulation.”60 There was no limit to the poetics meant to discredit the
artificial improvement of wine.
Herr Jordan of the Pfalz, estate owner and politically powerful opponent
of Gallisierung, found “all means of artificially ennobling wine decisively
condemnable because the bouquet of the wine is invariably covered up or
destroyed and therefore the credit of wine merchants suffer. It is a known fact
that in regions of Germany and France where wine falsification is practiced,
sales have more or less declined.” Jordan’s conclusions were seconded by
the chemist Böheim, who claimed that “the aroused mistrust has now turned
against all German wines, even against the natural wines of the honest
merchant. The solid merchant has seen his business come to a halt because
in no other business is the trust of the merchant as important as in selling
wine. This mistrust is his death.”61
Estate owner von Buhl of Deidesheim (Pfalz), whose family would later
play an important role in natural wine legislation, believed that Gallisierung
deserved the interest of the sanitation police and the suspicion of economists.
He advocated the involvement of the sanitation police in order to protect
unsuspecting wine consumers from the potential ill-effects of adulterated
wine. Buhl even helped to draw up a proposal for protections to be sent to
the legislature. The proposal demanded that prohibitive measures be estab-
lished to force adulterated wine to be properly identified by its producers
and sellers and that it not be sold under the name “wine,” since the public
understood this term to be associated only with natural wine.62 For Buhl,
both producers of natural wine as well as consumers were sacrificial victims
to artificial wine purveyors.
In 1854, an anonymous member of the Agricultural Association for the
Prussian Rhine Province published a booklet directed toward Mosel wine
producers and consumers that was largely a defamatory piece about Gall and
other alleged purveyors of evil on the Mosel. Aside from causing massive
headaches, wine treated according to Gall’s method, the author claimed,
lacked the true bouquet and taste of natural wine. Opponents of Gallisierung
charged that “artificial wine is neither as pleasurable nor as healthy as natural
wine, and artificial wine could not be considered a means against sickness,”
as many natural wines were considered at the time.63 It has been proven,
the booklet continued, that the taste of natural wine is not derived from
fermentation, but from the vegetation process, and is already formed in the
unfermented grape must. A manipulated fermentation process thus leads to
 Acidity and Power 307

an unnatural bouquet and taste. Natural and artificial were considered two
separate categories of drink, the former being the true and inimitable wine.
Producers and merchants were warned not to dabble with Gall’s ideas lest
they join bad company.64

WHITE WINE AND RED POLITICS

Many political allies of Ludwig Gall were eager to publish booklets and
broadsheets defending Gallisierung as necessary for the rectification of
poverty among vintners. Just as Gall had done, his advocates drew on politi-
cized themes in the post-1848 environment to drive home their points. This
was no secret as the anti-Prussian Mainzer Journal identified Gall’s wine-
making methods as “disguised political activities” (Deckmantel politischer
Umtriebe) as early as 1854.65 Although the struggling vintners of the Mosel
were the focus for Gall and many of his contemporaries, class struggle proved
to be broader than regional rivalries. In the early 1850s, an anonymous au-
thor identified as “an advocate from the Pfalz” published a booklet titled On
the Question of Gallisierung. The author claimed that deacidified wines were
indistinguishable from natural wines and that there was simply no proof
that these wines were detrimental to a drinker’s health, as had been claimed
elsewhere.66
Alfred Faber, another supporter of Gall, published in 1854 a book titled
Vintners, Open Your Eyes!, also dedicated to the small winegrowers of the
Pfalz. Faber took large estate owners to task for hoodwinking small vintners.
The book opened with an unambiguous statement directed towards the
struggling vintner: “Certain people are zealously trying to win you over
against Gall’s winemaking methods. These people are not out for your best
interest, they are your enemies.” These enemies, we hear from Faber, are
in fact the ones doing the deceiving: “Those that had visited the cellars of
the wealthiest wine estate owners and the largest merchant houses know
that these kings of the wine industry, including those near you, have long
understood and practiced the art of turning bad wine into good wine. Earlier
they had only used sugar according to Chaptal’s method, and now, according
to Gall’s method, they use sugar and water.” Faber relentlessly attacked the
hypocritical estate owners with a barrage of accusations that appealed to
the growing sense of political connectedness among small vintners. The
already wealthy, according to Faber, were only out for themselves and for
more money, so much so that their proverb must be “we come first, then
us again, and then us still once more; if there is anything else remaining,
then others may be heard.” Faber asked his readers to ponder why, at a time
when agricultural schools were being founded everywhere in Germany, no
school for vintners was even being discussed, except for the one that Gall
has proposed.67
308 K. D. Goldberg

CONCLUSION

In southern Germany, Gall’s social-politicking led to his arrest as well as to

the prosecution of vintners and merchants who practiced his methods. In
the first edition of his Practical Reports, Gall issued a public challenge to the
Bavarian King, claiming that in his majesty’s prosperous and enlightened
province, an act of appalling barbarism was being carried out; the neglect of
vintners’ poverty. Gall went on to compare the dire circumstances of Pfalz
vintners (the Pfalz was a holding of Bavaria at the time) to that of the more
publicized Silesian weavers. The terrifying crisis for Gall and his followers
demonstrated the high stakes involved in the artificial wine question, but it
also made strikingly clear that wine adulteration, even if physically harmless
and potentially beneficial for consumers, was as much political provocation
as it was a matter of taste.68 As we have seen, in spite of the primacy of
economic concerns in the fight over wine adulteration, its reach extended to
questions of national and regional identities, discussions about class drinking
cultures, and the politicization of wine production and consumption.69
While Gall and his followers openly declared their intention to level
the playing field between poor and wealthy vintners, the opposition groups
who targeted Gallisierung masked their interests under the guise of a culture
war of sorts. As the sources frequently reveal, terms such as “purity,” “nat-
uralness,” and “unfair competition” were bandied about by the opposition
in vain attempts to preserve an unbalanced trade. With the passing of the
Circulation of Foodstuffs, Luxury Goods, and Commodities Law of May 14,
1879, the German parliament had succumbed to the voices of opposition
and had made Gallisierung illegal. A virtual witchhunt of lawsuits preyed on
vintners and merchants who had long been suspected of deacidifying their
wines. Although later laws would again make deacidification permissible, it
would never come to be seen as wholly natural, as in most of the rest of
Europe, and the “estate-like barriers of consumption” erected in nineteenth-
century Europe served to clearly delineate between quality natural wines
and mass artificial wines (although they were often impossible to differen-
tiate by taste).70 A final important point is that none of this was done with
the consumer in mind; in fact, it was largely the consumer who would suffer
with inflated prices, and—in many cases—too sour natural wine.
It is also noteworthy that, still today, chemical analysis nor the most
expert of wine critics can accurately discern between natural wine and wine
treated according to Gall’s method. This was precisely what made Gall and
his followers so dangerous. If the quality of wine was no longer dependent
upon the natural advantages of the privileged vineyards purchased by elite
winegrowers, then land values and the high prices fetched for their wines
would, in theory, no longer be merited or sustained. This threat was in fact
a major catalyst for the discourse of terroir, or the idea that land and climate
are so crucial in the taste of natural wines. Although cellar techniques could
 Acidity and Power 309

make a sour wine pleasurable, the wines treated according to Gall’s method
were, as the opposition routinely argued, without “place” (i.e., without the
characteristics of a certain climate or vineyard) in the same way that natural
wines were defined by place. Thus even a sour wine from a definable
place was seen as better than a pleasant wine without a demarcated origin.
Although this article has only touched on the very early anti-Gallisierung
movement, later years would bring about a host of innovations in the trade
that all tried to suppress the onslaught of artificial wine. Such innovations,
including estate bottling, natural-wine auctions, and single-vineyard wines
(still a staple of the luxury German wine trade, as well as in Burgundy, where
vintners sought to duplicate the German model), still dominate the luxury
end of the German wine trade.

NOTES

1. André L. Simon, Vintagewise: A Postscript to Saintsbury’s Notes on a Cellar (London: Michael

Joseph, Ltd., 1949), 143–144. Among the oldest and most detailed accounts of German winegrowing is
Mosella, by the Roman poet Decimus Magnus Ausonius.
2. Because the English “Moselle” is infrequently used today and the river is little known to English
speakers outside the context of German wines, I prefer to use the shorter and more appropriate “Mosel.”
3. Cited in Arthur Hill Hassall, Food, Its Adulteration, and the Methods for Their Detection (London:
Longmans, Green, 1876), 784.
4. Hans J. Teuteberg, “Food adulteration and the beginnings of uniform food legislation in late
nineteenth-century Germany,” The Origins and Development of Food Policies in Europe, eds. John Burnett
and Derek J. Oddy (London: Leicester University Press, 1994), 146–160. Laws concerning wine adulteration
in Imperial Germany (1871–1918) passed in 1879, 1892, 1901, and 1909.
5. The words “viticulture” and “viniculture” offer distinct meanings. Viticulture refers to the pro-
cesses involved with grape growing, breeding, and harvesting, while viniculture refers to turning the
grapes into wine. The adulteration discussed here is vinicultural in nature, meaning that it involves
processes in the cellar.
6. Frederick Accum, A Treatise on Adulteration of Food, and Culinary Poisons: Exhibiting the
Fraudulent Sophistications of Bread, Beer, Wine, Spiritous Liquors, Tea, Coffee, Cream, Confectionery,
Vinegar, Mustard, Pepper, Cheese, Olive Oil, Pickles, and Other Articles Employed in Domestic Economy.
And Methods of Detecting Them (Philadelphia: AB’M Small, 1820), 74–75.
7. This is not to say that more dangerous forms of adulteration ceased to exist. In fact, the
“antifreeze scandal” (diethylene glycol) that rocked the Austrian wine trade in the 1980s points to the
persistence of desperate attempts to sell wine. Fritz Hallgarten, Wine Scandal (London: Sphere Books
Limited, 1986).
8. As others have recently shown, natural food propaganda was not necessarily tied to particular
political parties, but could in fact be appropriated by any number of different ideological movements.
Corinna Treitel, “Nature and the Nazi Diet,” Food and Foodways 17 (2009): 139–158. Food policy was
often interwoven into the economic and political spheres. For example, see Michael French and Jim
Phillips, “Sophisticates or Dupes? Attitudes toward Food Consumers in Edwardian Britain,” Enterprise &
Society 4 (2003): 442–470.
9. Cited in Peter Scholliers, “Food Fraud and the Big City: Brussels’ Responses to Food Anxieties
in the Nineteenth Century,” Food and the City in Europe since 1800, eds. Peter J. Atkins, Peter Lummel,
and Derek J. Oddy (Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007), 77.
10. On the challenges of “authentic” food cultures, see Meredith E. Abarca, “Authentic or Not, It’s
Original,” Food and Foodways 12 (2004): 1–25.
11. Alessandro Stanziani, “Information, quality and legal rules: Wine adulteration in nineteenth
century France,” Business History 51 (2009): 268–291. The role of phylloxera as a fillip for wine adul-
teration is explored by James Simpson in “Cooperation and conflicts: Institutional innovation in France’s
310 K. D. Goldberg

wine markets, 1870–1911,” Business History Review 79, No. 3 (Autumn 2005): 527–558. Leo Loubère, who
sees all wines as “manufactured” or “elaborated,” has a justifiably hard time drawing a clear line between
adulterated and unadulterated wines. Leo A. Loubère, The Wine Revolution in France: The Twentieth
Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 155.
12. On the 1870s, see Vera Hierholzer, “The ‘War Against Food Adulteration’: Municipal Food
Monitoring and Citizen Self-Help Associations in Germany, 1870s–1880s,” Food and the City, 117–128.
13. For recent work on food innovation, see Uwe Spiekermann, “Twentieth-Century Product In-
novations in the German Food Industry,” Business History Review 83.2 (2009): 291–315; and Alessan-
dro Stanziani, “Negotiating Innovation in a Market Economy: Foodstuffs and Beverages Adulteration in
Nineteenth-Century France,” Enterprise and Society Vol. 8, No. 2 (June 2007): 380.
14. A similar process can be found in the French meat trade, where nomenclature was used as a
way to differentiate products. Anne Lhuissier, “Cuts and Classification: The Use of Nomenclatures as a
Tool for the Reform of the Meat Trade in France, 1850–1880,” Food and Foodways 10 (2003): 183–208.
15. The discourse of terroir is similar to eco and organic food labeling today, which can largely
be viewed as a reaction to agro-food industrialization. Julie Guthman, “The ‘organic commodity’ and
other anomalies in the politics of consumption,” in Geographies of Commodity Chains, Alex Hughes and
Suzanne Reimer, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 235. For a solid introduction to terroir, see Amy
Trubek, The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2008). For a more detailed application, see James E. Wilson, Terroir: The Role of Geology, Climate, and
Culture in the Making of French Wine (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
16. Professor Karl Koch, General Secretary of the Association for the Advancement of Prussian
Agricultural Estates, wrote in the 1850s: “Riesling is the king of all white grapes because no other grape
produces wines of such fine aromas and length of life in the cellar . . . from Riesling comes wine such
as the Johannisberger, Rüdesheimer, Markobrunner, Nierensteiner, etc., from the Rheingau.” Karl Koch,
Bericht über die Austellung von Obst, Wein und Gemüse zu Naumburg während der Tage vom 9. bis
13.Oktober 1853 (Berlin: Bei Karl Wiegandt, 1854), 53.
17. Felix Meyer, Weinbau und Weinhandel an Mosel, Saar und Ruwer: Ein Rückblick auf die
letzten 100 Jahre (Koblenz: Görres-Druckerei, 1926).
18. The French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic occupation of the Rhineland served
as a break between early modern and modern viticulture, as secularization and mediatization forced the
breakup (although only to a limited extent) of Church and noble wine estates. Michael Müller, Säkular-
isation und Grundbesitz. Zur Sozialgeschichte des Saar-Mosel-Raumes 1794–1813 (Boppard, Germany:
Boldt, 1980).
19. Annette Winter-Tarvainen, Weinbaukrise und Preussisiche Zoll—und Steuerpolitik in ihren
Auswirkungen auf die soziale Situation der Moselwinzer im 19. Jahrhundert (Trier: Verlag Trierer His-
torische Forschungen, 1992), 27.
20. On the improvements made by the first generation of vintners in the post-Napoleonic
Rhineland, see Servatius Muhl, Der Weinbau an Mosel und Saar, so weit diese der Krone Preussens
angehören, im Vergleich mit dem Betrieb dieses Kulturzweiges in andern Ländern (Trier: Verlag von C.
Troschel, 1845).
21. Meyer, Weinbau, 39. For other price drops, see Manfred Daunke, Die Naussauisch-Preussische
Weinbaudomäne im Rheingau 1806–1918 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), 123.
22. For a contemporary account and explanation of the Mosel plight, see Mittheilungen des Vereins
zur Förderung der Weinkultur an Mosel und Saar in Trier, 1837–1842 (Trier: J. J. Lintz, 1837–1843).
23. The impact of the expansion on the price of Mosel wine cannot be overestimated. Taking one
example, the average price per Fuder (960 liters) of wine from a Middle-Mosel estate plummeted from
roughly 160 Talers in 1834 to about 10 Talers in 1835. The 160 Taler price would not be reached again
until the late 1850s, when Gallisierung, to be explained later, was underway. Meyer, Weinbau, 312.
24. In the period 1844–1847, the price of rye rose 173 percent while the price of potatoes rose a
staggering 340 percent. Winter-Tarvainen, Weinbaukrise, 129.
25. While the acute effects of the 1848/49 Revolutions are certainly in play, the declining economic
condition for Mosel winegrowing families is paramount. See Arthur Weber, “Die Amerika-Auswanderer
aus Graach im 19. Jahrhundert,” in 1000 Jahre Weinort Graach an der Mosel 975–1975 (Gemeinde
Graach, 1975), 154–157. Also, Winter-Tarvainen, Weinbaukrise, 104, and Bernard Hebeler, “Statistics of
Prussia” Journal of the Statistical Society of London Vol. 10 (May, 1847): 154–186. According to Hebeler,
 Acidity and Power 311

the large majority of emigrants from the Regierungsbezirk Trier headed for America, some of whom
helped to build its fledgling wine industry.
26. See Meyer, Weinbau.
27. For Marx’s writings on the Mosel crisis, see Hans Pelger, ed. Karl Marx Texte aus der Rheinis-
chen Zeitung von 1842/43 mit Friedrich Engels’ Artikeln im Anhang (Trier: Verlag Neu GmbH, 1984);
and Helmut Mathy “Karl Marx und die Not der Moselwinzer” in Bernkastel-Wittlich Kreisjahrbuch (1984),
143–150.
28. The quote is attributed to the Mosel democrat Johann Peter Coblenz, a correspondent for
the Rheinische Zeitung. Cited in Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and
the Revolution of 1848–1849 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 148–149. Sperber argues
that the greatest cause of distress for Mosel vintners was neither the expansion of the tariff boundary
nor the burdensome taxes, but rather the increasing price of basic foodstuffs which cut the demand for
mediocre-quality wines because consumers were forced to seek less expensive alcoholic alternatives.
Must is the name for the product that results from pressed or smashed grapes.
29. Sperber, Rhineland Radicals, 19.
30. Sperber, Rhineland Radicals, 20.
31. Karl Graff, Der Moselwein als Getränk und Heilmittel. Nebst einem Anhange über den Wein-
handel an der Mosel (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1821), 27.
32. Graff, Der Moselwein, 42–43.
33. Joh. Ph. Bronner, Der Weinbau in der Provinz Rheinhessen, im Nahethal und Moselthal (Hei-
delberg: Universitätsbuchhandlung von C. F. Winter, 1834), 170.
34. H. Bence Jones, “On the Acidity, Sweetness, and Strength of Wine, Beer and Spirits,” Abstracts
of the Papers Communicated to the Royal Society of London, Vol. 6. (1850–1854): 378–380. The test group
included Mosel, Rhine, Champagne, Burgundy, Claret (Bordeaux), Port, Madeira, and Sherry.
35. Lüderdorf’s experiment can be found in the 24th volume of Erdmanns Journal für Chemie
und Physik. The 1841 experiment used only “quality” wines from the 1834 vintage.
36. Dr. Hlubeck, Untersuchungen und Betrachtungen über den Weinbau Untersteiermarks (Gratz,
Austria: 1843).
37. Rudolf Singer, “Ludwig Gall, der erste deutsche Socialist,” in Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft,
Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung (Prague and Vienna, 1894): 417; Fritz Brügel and Benedikt Kautsky, Der
deutsche Sozialismus von Ludwig Gall bis Karl Marx (Vienna: Hess, 1931); and Heinz Monz, Ludwig Gall –
Leben und Werk (Trier: NCO Verlag Neu & Co., 1979).
38. Gall’s parents operated a wine tavern in Aldenhoven. His career began during the French
occupation of the Rhineland, and, like many contemporaries, he quickly found employment with the
Prussian occupation after 1815. In 1819, Gall helped a cadre of Germans, including vintners, establish
settlement communities in and around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He returned to Germany the following
year. Following some administrative positions in Trier, Koblenz, and other towns in western Germany,
Gall resigned from the Prussian administration to oversee various agricultural estates in Hungary. Gall’s
almost fourteen-year stay in Hungary ended when he was sent back to Trier during the unrest of 1848
(Gall was accused of being an accomplice to the revolutionary Lajos Kossuth). The rest of Gall’s career
was dedicated to the plight of impoverished winegrowers and journalism.
39. Monz, Ludwig Gall, 212. Also see Heinz Monz, “Ludwig Gall: Retter der Moselwinzer oder
Weinfälscher?” Gesellschaft für Geschichte des Weines E.V. (Wiesbaden, 1980): 3–23.
40. For Gall’s most extensive analysis of the Mosel crisis and a detailed description of his winemak-
ing method, see the posthumous publication Das Gallisiren. Vollständiges Handbuch der Weinbereitung,
zusammengestellt under Berücksichtigung der im Besitze der Verlagshandlung befindlichen hinterlassen
Papiere des Dr. Ludwig Gall (Trier: L.A. Galls Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1867); and Gall’s Der Nothstand der
Winzer und seine Ursachen-gestern und heute, reprinted in Heinz Monz, ed. (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher
Verlag, 1993). See appendix in Monz for a complete list of Gall’s publications.
41. Ludwig Gall, Praktische Anleitung, sehr gute Mittelweine selbst aus unreifen Trauben, und
vortrefflichen Nachwein aus den Trestern zu erzeugen, als Mittel, durch Vor- und Auslesen und Sortiren
alljährlich auch werthvolle Desertweine zu gewinnen. Nebst Nachrichten von meinem Verfahren, allen-
thaben und zu jeder Jahreszeit geringe Gewächse zu guten Mittelweinen umzubilden (Trier: Verlag von F.
A. Gall, 1854), 1. Reprinted in Monz, “Der Nothstand der Winzer. An excerpted translation is available in
the Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1860. Agriculture. (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1861), 323–358.
312 K. D. Goldberg

42. Gall, Praktische Anleitung, 34.

43. Gall, Praktische Anleitung, 34.
44. Gall, Praktische Anleitung, 51.
45. Gall, Der Nothstand der Winzer, 54–55.
46. See Alfred Faber, Winzer thut die Augen auf! Prüfet die Gall’sche Weinbereitungs-Lehre und
associirt Euch, d.h. vereinigt Euch, helft Euch einander, um durch dasselbe zuerst unabhängig und
allmälig wohlhaben zu werden (Trier: Verlag von F. Gall, 1854), Statt einer Vorrede.
47. Faber, Winzer thut die Augen auf!, 2.
48. Faber, Winzer thut die Augen auf!, 60. See, “Neuesten und Nützlichsten,” Trierer Zeitung, (16.
February 1852). Chaptalization, named after Napoleon’s Minister of the Interior Jean-Antoine Chaptal
(1801–1804), was a widely used method of both sweetening and strengthening alcohol in wine. Chaptal
was an eccentric, much in the way that Gall would become, and was vitally important in the French
formation of industrial and entrepreneurial values that tamed science into a set of practices teachable to
lay practitioners. Jeff Horn and Margaret C. Jacob, “Jean-Antoine Chaptal and the Cultural Roots of French
Industrialization,” Technology and Culture 39 (October 1998): 671–698; and J. B. Gough, “Winecraft and
Chemistry in 18th-Century France: Chaptal and the Invention of Chaptalization,” Technology and Culture
39 (January 1998): 74–104.
49. “Versuche und Maβnahmen zur Verbesserung des Domanialweinbaubetriebes.” Abt. 454, Nr.
21. Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden.
50. Alfred Faber, Zur Weinveredlungsfrage. Was muß geschehen, um auch in ungünstigen Jahren
höchst edle Ausleseweine als reines Naturgewächs, und selbst aus unreifen Trauben noch sehr gute Mittel-
weine zu erzeugen und dadurch den Ertrag unseres Weinbau’s zu verdreifachen (Trier: Braun’s Verlag,
1858), 6.
51. Ludwig Gall, “Mein Wollen und mein Wirken.” Published in Beleuchtung der Förster’schen
sogenannten Kritik der gerühmtesten Destillirgeräthe. Nebst Vorschlägen zu einem Wettbrennen zwischen
denjenigen Apparaten, welche darauf Anspruch machen, die zwechmäßigsten zu seyn (Trier, 1835),
54–78. Reprinted in Ludwig Gall: Was könnte helfen? (Glashütten im Taunus: Verlag Detlev Auvermann
KG, 1974), 250–251.
52. Gall, Der Nothstand der Winzer, 50.
53. “Zur Frage des Gallisirens,” Die Weinlaube (15 May 1872), No. 10, 151.
54. “Zur Geschichte der Weinverbesserung und Weinfabrikation,” in Annalen der Oenologie, 1870,
98–100.
55. “Zur Geschichte der Weinverbesserung und Weinfabrikation,” 103–106. Also see H. Böheim,
Zeitschrift des Landwirthschaftliches Vereins in Baiern (1861): 172–191.
56. Englerth’s comments cited in J. Dornfeld, Die Wein- und Obst-Producenten Deutschlands. Sys-
tematisch geordneter Zusammentrag der wichtigsten Verhandlungen derselben bei den Versammlungen
in den Jahren 1838 bis 1849 (Stuttgart und Tübingen: J.G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1852), 400–403. Also, Sebas-
tian Englerth, Deutscher Weinbau und Weinhandel, dessen mögliche Konkurrenz mit dem französischen;
und die chemische Wein-Verbesserung, vom Standpunkte der Wein-Wissenschaft beleuchtet (Würzburg:
Bonitas-Bauer, 1849).
57. Today’s wine laws in Germany and France are a reflection of each nation’s historical approach
to the natural/artificial issue in the nineteenth century. For example, the finest producers in Bordeaux
or Burgundy are not prohibited from adding sugar to the must or performing other procedures that are
prohibited in Germany for quality-designated wines.
58. “Natur und Kunstwein,” Die Weinlaube (15 November 1875), No. 22, 410.
59. “Weinverbesserung und Weinschmiererei,” Deutsche Wein-Zeitung (1 December 1874), No.
23, 99.
60. For Mangold’s comments, see Dornfeld, Die Wein- und Obst-Producenten Deutschlands,
400–409.
61. “Zur Geschichte der Weinverbesserung und Weinfabrikation,” 103–106.
62. For Buhl’s comments, see Georg David, Verhandlungen der Section für Weinbau auf der
16. Sectionsversammlung der Wein- und Obstproducenten des südwestlichen Deutschlands in Trier vom
28–30. Sept., 1874 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1875), 13.
63. “Zur Geschichte der Weinverbesserung und Weinfabfrikation,” 275.
 Acidity and Power 313

64. Ueber Weinveredlung und Weinverfälschung. Ein nöthiges Wort an Weinproduzenten und
Weinconsumenten von einem Mitgliede des landwirthschaftlichen Vereins für Rheinpreußen (Trier: In
Commission bei C. Troschel, 1854).
65. See Mainzer Journal, No. 270, 19 November 1854. Monz, Ludwig Gall, 166.
66. Monz, Ludwig Gall, 168.
67. Alfred Faber, Winzer thut die Augen auf! Ludwig Gall requested an honorarium of twenty
Thaler for purchases of his winemaking instructions. This money, according to Gall, would be put
towards founding a school for winemaking, the first of its kind in Germany. The first significant school
in Germany with a focus on winemaking was the Geisenheim Grape Breeding Institute, founded in
1872. The Geisenheim Wine Research Institute remains one of the largest and most important enological
schools in the world.
68. Monz, Ludwig Gall, 170–177.
69. The literature on wine and taste is amassing at a quickening pace. For recent contributions
see Marion Demossier, “Consuming Wine in France: The ‘Wandering’ Drinker and the Vin-anomie,”
in Drinking Cultures: Alcohol and Identity, ed. Thomas M. Wilson (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005),
129–154; Sarah Howard, “Selling Wine to the French: Official Attempts to Increase French Wine Consump-
tion, 1931–1936, Food & Foodways 12, No. 4 (January 2004): 197–224; Kolleen M. Guy, When Champagne
became French: Wine and the making of a National Identity (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 2003). Of significant value for its concern with broader historiographical questions is Thomas
Brennan, Burgundy to Champagne: The Wine Trade in Early Modern France (Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Also excellent is Charles Cameron Ludington, “To the King o’er
the Water: Scotland and Claret, c. 1600–1763,” in Alcohol: A Social and Cultural History, ed. Mack P. Holt
(Oxford, England and New York: Berg, 2006), 163–184.
70. Klaus Tenfelde, “Klassenspezifischer Konsummuster im Deutschen Kaiserreich,” in Europäis-
che Konsumgeschichte. Zur Gesellschafts—und Kulturgeschichte des Konsums, 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert,
Hannes Siegrist, Hartmut Kaeble, and Jürgen Kocka, eds. (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag,
1997), 245–266. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer also argue that consumption patterns in Germany, at
least until the mid-twentieth century, only served to reinforce pre-existing social boundaries. Konrad H.
Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2003), 306–314.
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