November 25

November 25, 1818: Lambert Heinrich von Babo, the German chemist, was born. The son of the agronomist Lambert Joseph von Babo and Karoline Ehrmann, he studied medicine and chemistry at Heidelberg and Munich, took his doctorate at Heidelberg in 1842, and later worked under Justus von Liebig at Giessen; in chemistry he is remembered for the Babo funnel and “Babo’s law” on vapor pressure. His half-brother, the oenologist August Wilhelm von Babo, founded the viticulture and oenology school at Klosterneuburg near Vienna and gave his name to the Babo (KMW) scale still used to gauge grape must weight.November 25, 1991: The Grand Valley American Viticultural Area was established in western Colorado. Centered on Palisade and Grand Junction along the Colorado River in Mesa County, this high-elevation appellation is the heart of Colorado’s wine industry and grows the majority of the state’s wine grapes.For more dates in wine history, click here.

 

Hero image: C.Stadler/Bwag / CC BY-SA 3.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.