Spotlight on Louis Pasteur

hello welcome back to history of wine and the vine i'm emily kate so this week we're going to do bit of spotlight on louis pasteur and louis pasteur has been very very pivotal in the industry his discoveries really have shaped the industry as it is today if you are not familiar with him he conducted some experiments and actually found out that fermentation is caused by the growths of microorganisms and that these microorganisms aren't spontaneously generated but they are result of biogenesis so he in essence he ran couple of experiments where he limited the oxygen contact that specific wines had and specific kind of liquids had and saw kind of the microorganism growth and he was able to infer that the act of kind of wine turning is because of things found in air that wine doesn't just turn on its own if it's protected it won't spoil but if it's exposed to air it will he also found out that the microorganism yeast was what was fermenting the wine so although these sound like crazy things to find out they were and he did prove them but there were lot of precursors throughout history that i'd love to share with you today starting with in somebody named joseph kailusak actually figured out that it was that fermentation was sugars being converted into alcohol and carbon dioxide and this is one thousand percent true the only thing he didn't really understand was what the microorganism was that was doing this so he knew what the process was but he couldn't quite put his finger on yeast so that's where pasteur came in but definitely joseph gailusak laid the groundwork we'll say for that one then next we have we're going back further to the middle ages and in the middle ages in germany they were making lot of really high quality wine because they don't have very high yields the wine was very high in acid and they wanted to age it and this really wasn't done in the middle ages the middle ages was time when vintage wine didn't exist if you had wine for year you tossed it out you threw it out you gave it to somebody who didn't have any wine at all it really wasn't done and so this was one of the first wines to come out of the middle ages and say no aging is good thing you just have to do it properly so what is properly well what they did was instead of taking barrels or barriques these smaller kind of wooden crates barrels they took something called ton and ton is just enormous enormous barrel now why this is good is because the amount of wine that's kind of touching or exposed to oxygen in this barrel is so small compared to the enormous quantity of wine that you have in the barrel anyway so these tons just limited the oxygen contact and by doing that they were able to age the wine without it turning to vinegar so this was kind of the precursor of recognizing that you needed an airtight or as little air as you could have in contact with the wine in order to make it remain sound and not spoil now lastly we go back even further to ancient rome around the 1st century a.d now we know of galen and he was not only wine connoisseur he made wine but it was his father who recognized and passed the information down to him that if you had bad vintage you could salvage the bad vintage and make sure that your wine didn't turn turn to vinegar or spoil by heating it so this is pasteurization just way back in the roman time so find this really interesting that they knew mean they didn't exactly know that they were you know killing off bacteria and whatever but they knew that they were saving their wine from spoiling in bad years by heating it so hope you found this as interesting as do think this is ridiculously awesome if don't say so myself and if you liked it give it big thumbs up and subscribe for more lectures because there's always coming and will see you next week cheers