The 20th Century

The Frost of 1956 and the Professor: How Bordeaux Became Modern

February 1956's great frost devastated Bordeaux. Émile Peynaud's oenology, stainless steel and château bottling then built the modern vineyard.

In February 1956 a frost killed whole vineyards across the Gironde, and the replanting that followed pushed Malbec out of Bordeaux and Merlot to the top of it. Over the next twenty-five years the region's cellars changed as much as its vines. Wooden vats gave way to stainless steel, estates began bottling their own wine, and the spring "second fermentation" that growers had feared as a disease was explained and put to work. The scientist most responsible for the cellar side of that change was Émile Peynaud, who went on to advise most of the classified growths of the Médoc and Graves. No other single person did as much to set what modern red wine tastes like.

Before 1956, Bordeaux's working methods were still largely those of the nineteenth century. Three decades of war, depression and more war had left estates short of money and cellars unrenewed. Fermentations ran hot or stopped dead, and hygiene was approximate.

The cold of February 1956

January 1956 had been mild. On 30 January a surge of Siberian air, pushed by an anticyclone, dropped temperatures across France by 20 to 25 °C in forty-eight hours, and the cold then held, almost without a break, until the end of February. It remains the coldest month of the twentieth century in France. For the southern half of the country the weather chronicler Guillaume Séchet goes further: it may have been the coldest month since records and reconstructions began, with the winters of 1709 and 1684 as the only comparisons historians find. Bordeaux, a city of oceanic winters, measured about –14 °C and received roughly 80 centimetres of snow over the month, among the heaviest falls ever observed in France.

The timing is what killed the vines. A vine hardened by steady winter cold can survive a deep frost; one caught after a mild January, with sap beginning to move, cannot. Damage was heavy across France, and Alsace lost up to half of some crops. In the Gironde entire parcels froze to the root, above all on the right bank, where Saint-Émilion and Pomerol were among the worst hit. Vines that looked scorched in spring were found dead by summer, and whole vineyards had to be pulled out and replanted. The 1956 vintage was small and poor. The loss ran on for years afterwards, because a replanted vine needs the better part of a decade before it yields serious wine.

Malbec after the frost

Replanting meant choosing what to plant, and the choice growers made in the late 1950s is still visible in the region's vineyards.

Malbec, called pressac or noir de Pressac on the right bank, had been a major Bordeaux variety since before phylloxera. The February freeze killed about three quarters of the Malbec crop, and most growers did not replant it. It was sensitive to frost, irregular in yield and difficult on the rootstocks of the day. Merlot ripened earlier, produced more, and did well on the cool clays and limestone of the right bank. Plantings show the result: by 1968 Malbec covered about 4,900 hectares in the Libournais, and by 2000 roughly 1,400. The variety that later became Argentina's signature grape survives in its home region only in small plots.

Merlot had also been damaged in 1956, but it was replanted on a large scale, and from that point its lead over the other varieties was not reversed. The Merlot-led Bordeaux of today is therefore a product of a February freeze and the economics of replanting, not an ancient fact of terroir. It is the most recent of the changes in the region's grape mix traced in our history of Bordeaux's grape varieties.

Peynaud and Ribéreau-Gayon

Peynaud was born in 1912 and entered the trade at fifteen as a laboratory assistant at Calvet, a Bordeaux négociant, working under the chemist Jean Ribéreau-Gayon. The two became the founding partnership of modern oenology. Peynaud spent five years as a prisoner of war in Germany. After his return he rejoined Ribéreau-Gayon, completed his doctorate and settled at the university's wine research station. In 1949 Ribéreau-Gayon founded the Institut d'œnologie de Bordeaux, the forerunner of today's ISVV, with Peynaud beside him.

Their most consequential work concerned the "second fermentation". For centuries winemakers had watched it start in the barrels each spring, softening some wines and spoiling others once they were in bottle, without knowing what it was. Working together in the 1940s, Ribéreau-Gayon and Peynaud established that malolactic fermentation is carried out by bacteria, not yeast, and that it converts sharp malic acid into softer lactic acid. Their practical conclusion was that in red wines the conversion is desirable. It should be encouraged, completed and checked before bottling instead of being left to happen by accident afterwards. Peynaud counted the control of malolactic fermentation among his most important contributions. It is now a standard step in making virtually every serious red wine in the world.

Peynaud's rules for the cellar

From 1949 Peynaud took the laboratory's findings into the cellars, and his advice added up to a full method. Pick ripe grapes: "grapes not ripe enough to eat aren't fit for winemaking," he said. In practice that meant harvesting eight to ten days later than before the war, then finishing fast, in ten to fourteen days instead of three weeks. Sort out rotten and green fruit. Keep the cellar clean. Control temperature. At Château Léoville-Las-Cases, when stuck and spoiled fermentations were routine, he had overheating musts cooled using nothing more than thermometers and overnight transfers between vats. Vinify parcel by parcel and variety by variety, with old vines kept apart from young ones.

Then select. At Château Margaux, on his advice, between 20 and 40 percent of the wine entitled to the grand vin label went instead into the second wine, Pavillon Rouge, so that the first label carried only the best vats. Selection and second wines spread from there through the whole Médoc.

By giving this advice to hundreds of properties, Peynaud created a new profession, the consulting oenologist. At his peak he advised 45 of the Médoc's crus classés and 11 of the 13 classified growths of the Graves, as well as hundreds of properties in Pomerol, Saint-Émilion and Sauternes and clients abroad. For more than twenty years he gave a free oenology class every Monday. He trained on the order of 1,500 oenologists, Michel Rolland and Patrick Léon among them. He set out the method in Connaissance et travail du vin (1971), and in Le Goût du vin he made tasting into something that could be taught.

Stainless steel and château bottling

The method needed equipment. In 1961 Jean-Bernard Delmas succeeded his father as director of Château Haut-Brion and made it the first of the great growths to ferment in new stainless steel vats. Steel is easy to clean and quick to cool, which is what Peynaud's rules on hygiene and temperature required; Peynaud himself had argued for it after seeing modern installations abroad. Steel and temperature-controlled concrete spread through the leading estates in the investment wave of the 1960s and 1970s. Viticulture changed too: Haut-Brion began clonal-selection research with INRA in 1972.

The same decades settled who would bottle the wine. Since the nineteenth century most châteaux had shipped their wine in barrel to the négociants of the Chartrons, who aged it, bottled it and put their own names on the labels. Baron Philippe de Rothschild broke with this at Mouton in 1924, introducing mise en bouteille au château (estate bottling) as a guarantee of authenticity, and the other first growths followed. The practice became general only in the 1970s, after a scandal.

In June 1973 tax inspectors arrived at Cruse, one of the oldest houses on the Chartrons. They uncovered a fraud in which some three million bottles of doctored Languedoc and misdescribed wine had been sold under Bordeaux appellations. At the "Winegate" trial in 1974 there were eighteen defendants and eight convictions, and the broker Pierre Bert received a prison sentence. The case discredited the négoce and deepened a severe market crash. After it, château bottling became close to obligatory for any serious estate, and control over the wine, held by the merchants for centuries, passed to the properties.

"Peynaudization"

The changes drew criticism early. In the 1950s and 1960s sceptics were already talking about the "Peynaudization" of Bordeaux, arguing that wines made under his influence were becoming stereotyped: deep in colour, clean in fruit, balanced, with the irregularities removed. Peynaud answered: "The wines of yesterday were more stereotyped than today's. They were all similar because they shared the same defect. They were oxidized."

For his generation that answer held, and the criticism faded as the vintages improved. It returned in the 1990s and 2000s in a stronger form, aimed at the international consultants who had turned Peynaud's role into a business, several of them his former students, and at an "international style" that critics said was erasing the differences between places of origin. That argument is covered in the article on what terroir really is. Its terms, though, were first set in the Gironde's postwar cellars, in the dispute over Peynaud's methods.