After the French Revolution, the monasteries were disbanded, and while some aristocrats managed to hold on to their vineyard properties intact, the vineyards of the common people were divided and subdivided over generations of marriage, intermarriage, and inheritance law.
   Modern Burgundian growers might own several small plots of vines in many different villages; the lots from each vinified and bottled into separate wines. Whereas a Bordeaux producer might sell one or two wines under his estate name, a Burgundy producer might make ten or more different wines.
   For example, the 125 acre Grand Cru vineyard Clos de Vougeot had one owner at the time of the Revolution. Today, it has over 80!
   A great revolution in French gastronomy also goes back to the French Revolution and is due to the French cook Beauvilliers who, in 1765, opened a "bouillon", the first restaurant, in Paris. Customers were seated at small tables which were covered with tablecloths. It became a success which grew from strength to strength between 1790 and 1814, when the great cooks from the aristocratic houses found themselves out of work once their masters had fled abroad, so they decided to open their own restaurants.
   This is how, under the influence of the French Revolution, la grande cuisine made its way to the general public, accompanied, of course, by wine with every meal.
   After the war, Champagne also made several strides towards the drink we know and love today. Firstly dégorgement (the process of freezing and removing the end of the bottle to extract sediment after the second fermentation of a sparkling wine) was first practiced in 1813 and was perfected in 1818 by the Widow Clicquot's cellar master Antoine Muller.
   He developed a process of "riddling" the wine in order to get the sediment of dead yeast cells into the neck of the bottle so it could be removed without the time consuming task of decanting each bottle. This process also saved most of the gas.
   The 1820s and ‘30s saw the use of corking machines and wine muzzles. Finally in 1836, a pharmacist in Châlons-sur-Marne, M. François, invented an instrument, called a sucereoenomètre, to measure the amount of sugar in wine. With this invention, the amount of sugar needed to stimulate the second fermentation could be reliably determined, and the bottle burst-rate dropped to 5%.
   The next advances in wine making did not really occur until after the Boar War when South Africa became an aggressive wine exporter.