Unable to place any definite cause for his unease, Abbot Napp waited until after sunset, which still came early in the lengthening days of March, before going is search of Brother Gregory. Ever since his admittance to the monastery on 9th October 1843, Mendel had been a particular favorite of Abbot Napp's. The worldly cleric enjoyed the open, uncomplicated honesty of the peasant farmer's son, and he particularly enjoyed talking science with someone who had the best brain in Brno. Well aware of Brother Gregory's talents, he never the less was not blinded to his weaknesses; an inability to handle stress, and a real problem communicating his scientific genius. His last presentation to the Natural Science Society had proved that.
Shaking his head as he mused on the problems of his pupil, Abbot Napp first tried Mendel's rooms, but finding them empty, he cast a wider net.
"You'll probably find them in the old store room," Brother Victor, the monastery hospitallier, told him eventually. "They have been using it as a base for their wine research." Which was where the abbot finally located three excited monks.
"Father Abbot," Klacel shouted at him as he appeared at the doorway, "come and take a look at this!"
All the abbot could see were rows of wine bottles, each of which was capped but empty of wine. A closer look, however, revealed a dirty patch of jelly-like solid along the side of each container.
"This is the source of Herr Druer's problems," Brother Matthew said, turning one particular bottle over and over in his hands.
"Dirty wine bottles?" Napp couldn't help asking, even for the excitable Klacel this seemed excessive.
"No, no!" Brother Matthew laughed, "these, these growths on the surface of the broth, look!"
Abbot Napp looked closer. What he saw was a layer of jelly, hardened on its surface and on which there were small round gray bumps a few millimeters in diameter and a millimeter or so in height.
"Now look at this," Klacel instructed, turning the abbot's attention to Mendel's microscope which was set up on the table. Obediently Abbot Napp looked down the microscope and after a few moments adjusting the light and the focus, saw a soup of rods drifting in convoy across the viewing screen.
"What does this all mean?" he said, turning at last to Brother Gregory, who had been tabulating the wine bottles on what, Abbot Napp recognized, were sheets of his best note paper.
"We think we have found the cause of the souring in Herr Druer's wine," Brother Gregory said through lips blue with ink from his leaking pen. "Those rod-like organisms you have just seen are a form of bacterius first reported in sour sugarbeet fermentations by the French scientist Pasteur. If we are right, it is the growth of those rods that cause the wine sugar to become a sour acid, possibly of the carbonic form first described by Herr Doktor Kolbe."
All this was too much, too alien and too sudden for the abbot whose own scientific endeavors had been with sheep and apples, so he requested clarification.
"Normally," said Brother Gregory, "vigorous growths of yeast organisms in grape juice result in the conversion of sugar into ethyl compounds, of which the greatest part is alcohol. This fortifies the wine and gives it the taste and properties we all expect. Every brewer and vintner has experience occasions when the wine goes sour, but, until the research efforts of Herr Pasteur, no one has known why." He paused to pick up one of the contaminated wine samples they had collected in Herr Druer's cellar.
"In this case, the wine Herr Druer is fermenting, has become contaminated by a second type of organism. These rod-like bacteria are too small, even with a microscope, for us to detect any internal organization, but they clearly grow and multiply at a prodigious rate."
"As they grow," Brother Joseph took up the story, "they compete with the yeast for the sugar, but instead of converting the sugar to alcohol, they make sour acids."
"And the wine is spoilt," Brother Matthew finished.
"But what has any of this got to do with these 'growths' on the jelly?" Napp wanted to know, still somewhat lost.
"We took a sample of the contaminated wine," Mendel went on, "and diluted it to the point where every little rod-bacterium was fully separated away from every other bacterium and every other yeast. Then we spread that diluted liquid on the surface of this solid jelly, in which we had placed all the nutrients the organisms needed for growth."
Napp looked again at the wine bottles.
"We did that yesterday. Over night each single rod-bacterium has reproduced thousands of times, the growth rate must be phenomenal, and produced a mound of rod-bacteria; a ... er ..." he searched for the right word, "... er ... a colony of rods, all descendants of the original one."
"The number and distribution of those mounds, or colonies, as Mendel calls them, are a measure of the degree of contamination in Druer's wine," said Klacel, once again thrusting a wine bottle of jelly into Abbot Napp's hands.