In 1880, Dr. Eugene Hilgard asked the California state legislature for $3000 to start a wine research program at the University of California, and he got it.

His first start-up – the “California Agricultural Experiment Station,” now transmogrified into the University of California Davis’s massive agricultural extension program – had only been running for five years. At the time, Hilgard was the professor of agriculture for the entire university and, thus, the state. (Today, Davis’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences has 330 faculty and over 1000 graduate students.) In wine science, 1880 is more than halfway to ancient.

Pasteur had only demonstrated that alcoholic fermentation is about yeast reproduction in 1857 (though, to be fair, we had strong inklings before then). Wine has been around for some 7,000 years or so and we’ve surely been trying to make it better for nearly as long, but enology as we know it has really been the product of the past century or two.

In 1880, Dr. Eugene Hilgard asked the California state legislature for $3000 to start a wine research program at the University of California, and he got it. His first start-up – the “California Agricultural Experiment Station,” now transmogrified into the University of California Davis’s massive agricultural extension program – had only been running for five years.

At the time, Hilgard was the professor of agriculture for the entire university and, thus, the state. (Today, Davis’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences has 330 faculty and over 1000 graduate students.) In wine science, 1880 is more than halfway to ancient. Pasteur had only demonstrated that alcoholic fermentation is about yeast reproduction in 1857 (though, to be fair, we had strong inklings before then). Wine has been around for some 7,000 years or so and we’ve surely been trying to make it better for nearly as long, but enology as we know it has really been the product of the past century or two.