WI: Wine that Travels

During the 1780's Tuscany was very keen on developing a method to ensure their Wine could travel all the way to Britain without spoiling. Tuscany itself was full of British tourists at the time and so there was a great demand. What is amazing is that a large section of the Florentine intellectual class all wanted to address the question of how to make wine that travels. I have read that archeaologists even tried to answer the question from studying Etruscan inscriptions (there was also an Etruscanmania going on). The sideproducts of this research were Vermouth and some other successful drinks.

It wasn't until Louis Pasteur began work about 60 years later, when the science of preserving wine came into being. However what if by accident sulfites were stumbled upon as a solution. Even by simply improving the sanitation within the wineries traveling wine could be "discovered."

An economic boom would occur and Britain might have a greater cultural relationship with Tuscany as well. What other butterflies might take shape?
 
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I don't know much about wine, but would this increase the possibility of wine regions outside of Europe being developed earlier than in OTL?
 

archaeogeek

Banned
Booming Tuscany could easily have a lot more people by the 21st century. A succession of crisis, plus massive mismanagement by the late Medici, caused as much as half of the region's population to leave during the early 18th century, and it never quite recovered. Twice as many people basically makes Tuscany a far more important contender in the 1850s, with a population now around 3 million, or more than the Papacy.
 
If Winston Churchill doesn't have his Brandy (Brandy is as I understand it, spoiled wine) the English lose WWII

That's utter nonsense. Brandy is distilled wine. Spoiled wine turns into vinegar, or just a moldy bacterial soup.

Brandy itself actually has a fascinating history that somewhat relates to this. French wine makers realised there was an untapped market for their products in the Netherlands in the 17th century, and the Dutch had lots of money back then. Of course their wines spoiled on the way north, so they came up with the idea of distilling the drink and transporting it in barrels to the Netherlands. Once it arrived there the idea was to mix the distilled product with water to get wine, or at least something vaguely wine-like, out of it.

The Dutch couldn't be bothered with that though, so they just drank it as it was. They called it brandewijn, which means "burnt wine", which is where the word brandy comes from. In fact in the Nordic languages we use the same term to refer to certain distilled spirits to this day (the Swedish being brännvin, and the others being very similar, all meaning the same thing).
 
That's utter nonsense. Brandy is distilled wine. Spoiled wine turns into vinegar, or just a moldy bacterial soup.

Brandy itself actually has a fascinating history that somewhat relates to this. French wine makers realised there was an untapped market for their products in the Netherlands in the 17th century, and the Dutch had lots of money back then. Of course their wines spoiled on the way north, so they came up with the idea of distilling the drink and transporting it in barrels to the Netherlands. Once it arrived there the idea was to mix the distilled product with water to get wine, or at least something vaguely wine-like, out of it.

The Dutch couldn't be bothered with that though, so they just drank it as it was. They called it brandewijn, which means "burnt wine", which is where the word brandy comes from. In fact in the Nordic languages we use the same term to refer to certain distilled spirits to this day (the Swedish being brännvin, and the others being very similar, all meaning the same thing).

Thanks for clearing that up. I knew spoiling and wine were related. I just couldn't remember how. Thanks Charl. Still without Brandy we all might live under Nazis
 
Interesting, charl I never knew that about the Dutch.

I think the wine imported from Tuscany would still be a mainly upper class import for the British. So I don't know if it would mean a population boom, since Tuscany did grow enough before this to supply the British upper-class.

I found the guy to develop Pasteur's ideas early:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Fabbroni

Oddly enough apparently he deeply believed in this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory

Which held him back from truly understanding the fermentation process. I will have to do more research on this, but I think the major butterflies would likely be in the realm of science.
 
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What exactly was the problem with wine before Pasteur?

Isn't fermentation already a form of conservation?

Well, kind of. The thing is that fermented beverages can't reach levels of alcohol that will stop all kinds of bacteria from thriving in them. It will however kill more or less all kinds of micro-organisms (like amoebas, molds and even the yeast itself is slowly committing suicide by creating alcohol).

Wine spoils quite easily unless additionally preserved. As previously stated that's how you get vinegar (the very word itself coming from the Old French for sour or spoiled wine). The same is true for beer, which is why modern brewers use hops (apart from the flavour it adds) as hops contains substances that inhibit bacterial growth.

The only way to reach an alcohol content that will completely stop bacteria is by distillation. On the plus side though distilled beverages will keep forever, as long as they are bottled so that the alcohol doesn't evaporate. If you ever found an intact two hundred year old bottle of brandy lying around in some shipwreck or something you could drink it without worrying about your health. Well, except for the effects of the alcohol itself.
 
Could they make something similar to the Portuguese solution (fortification of the wine through the addition of distilled grape spirits)? They created Port Wine exactly in order to export it to England. And Italy certainly didn't have a lack of "grappa" to add in the wine.
 
As I read more about this, the more the idea of "tranveling wine" changes. You are right Gonzaga about Italian Fortified wines, and those were indeed just coming out around the 1770-1800 period. Vermouth and Marsala are both examples of Italian fortified wines.

I was wrong about Giovanni Fabbroni, even though he was a very important and intelligent guy, in fact it was his brother Adamo Fabbroni. He wrote the Art of Winemaking in 1786. It was a very important book, and is said to have very nearly perfectly described the process of fermentation. One interesting thing about the Fabbroni's was that Thomas Jefferson was on very familiar terms and considered them a part of his family. Jefferson was very interested in viticulture and was eager to learn from the Fabbronis.

According to The Red and the White by Leo Loubere, Adamo was led down a wrong path by the Phlogiston theory which was popular at the time. So perhaps a good POD would be Adamo rejecting Phlogiston and instead making a breakthrough in preserving wines. It would be a scientific jump of 50 years so maybe it is a bit unlikely, but there would be huge changes that would be interesting to see.
 
Marsala was originally created by an Englishman for his native country, as port was too expensive for many people. You could possibly have the idea touched upon earlier by English visitors to Tuscany.
 
Marsala was originally created by an Englishman for his native country, as port was too expensive for many people. You could possibly have the idea touched upon earlier by English visitors to Tuscany.

Yeah, maybe the idea is discovered even earlier say 1708, by a Englishman on a bender during the Grand Tour. Then when the Enlightenment really was getting into high gear around the late 1700's Fermentation theory and germ theory is discovered.
 
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