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In the 1830s,
the famed Romanée-Conti owner, Ouvrard made a world-renowned
wine, despite the fact that he was unaware of the existence of a microorganism,
Saccharomyces Cerevisiae, the wine yeast, which had yet to be discovered
by Pasteur. Ouvrard knew by taste and by seed color (brown, not green)
when the grapes were ripe. He knew that picking grape clusters gently
by hand and immediately crushing them by foot would lead to the beginning
of fermentation in several days. Destemming the grape was highly impractical
because automatic destemmers had not yet been invented. He did not
know that his inability to crush every grape meant that the seed tannin,
which is more bitter and astringent than skin and stem tannin, would
be left behind, producing a wine with mellower tannins. Nor did he
know that when his fermentation started, it actually started with
a non-wine yeast, such as Pichia, which died after only a few percent
alcohol was achieved, yielding to the dominant Saccharomyces Cerevisiae
yeast to finish the fermentation.
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