The Wine Revolution in France

402 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE charisma has earned him an international following as the bright light of the future of design. And, even though Mario Bellini ironically describes his design work for Olivetti as a “zoo of strange animals ready to be domesticated by the user” (n. 109), he has become the company’s cultural ambassador, whose outside activities included a major exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989 as well as a five-year term as editor of the prestigious Italian design magazine, Domus. Arthur J. Pulos Dr. Pulos is emeritus professor in and chairman of the Department of Design at Syracuse University, ffe is the author of The American Design Ethic and The American Design Adventure (Cambridge, Mass., 1983, 1988) and many articles on design philoso­ phy, theory, and practice. The Wine Revolution in France: The Twentieth Century. By Leo Loubère. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. Pp. xiv + 288; illustrations, tables, notes, index. $29.95. Leo Loubère’s Wine Revolution in France is clearly a labor of love. Every page of this work is permeated with a deep, almost religious, appreciation for its subject, wine. Yet this book is much more thanjust another paean to Bacchus and the mystical powers of his nectar. As carefully crafted as a fine bottle of Krug champagne, Loubère’s book is a concise and nuanced study of how unpredictable market condi­ tions, technological innovation, and the human mentalité have inter­ acted since the beginning of the 20th century to create a modern, technically sophisticated industry that represents an important sector of the French economy but that is also fraught with contradictions, plagued by problems of uneven development and unequal distribu­ tion of wealth, and faced with a far-from-certain future, it is an excellent illustration of how local environmental and psychological variables can produce a multitude of responses to general technolog­ ical and economic conditions within a single industry. Loubère argues that a revolution in French viticulture (the growing of grapes for wine) and viniculture (the actual manufacture of wine) began at the start of this century and accelerated rapidly thereafter, particularly since 1945. The impetus for this revolution was the volatile market for French wine during the 20th century, one charac­ terized by fluctuating prices, periodic crises of oversupply, declining per capita wine consumption within France, changing consumer preferences within France and those nations that imported its wine, and the disruption of traditional markets and the creation of new ones by war, the growth of domestic wine industries in countries such as the United States, and the establishment of the European Eco­ nomic Community (EEC). Viticulturalists did not respond to these TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 403 various problems and opportunities in a uniform manner, however, because of the regional nature of French wine growing. The major difference was between growers residing in regions specializing in the manufacture of well-known, relatively expensive, and high-quality wines (such as Champagne, Burgundy, and the area around Bor­ deaux) and those in the south, especially Lower Languedoc and Roussillon, who concentrated on the fabrication of cheap, red table wine (gros rouge). The former, in a general sense, reacted to the challenges of the 20th century with the cautious adoption of new technology, primarily in the area of viniculture, designed to improve and standardize the quality of their wine and to tailor it to consumer tastes, which increasingly favored less heavy beverages. They simul­ taneously took a number of steps to guarantee the quality of their product (e.g., through the adoption of the appellation system of classification) and to educate their customers, particularly in foreign markets, regarding the desirable characteristics of their wine. Southern growers, on the other hand, concentrated on increasing the size of their grape harvests through the implementation of agricultural field technology (tractors, mechanical cultivators, spray­ ers, harvesters, and various types of chemicals). Unfortunately, the introduction of these innovations coincided with a decline in domestic demand for gros rouge, the result of changes in the French social structure after World War II. Although overproduction and changing consumer tastes lay at the root of their problems, southern growers

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