“Wine inarguably displays the strongest geographic signature of all ...” - Matthew Goddard
Chapter 14 - Terroir
With this chapter we come to the conclusion of the grape growing section of the book. Terroir is the concept that knits together grape growing and winemaking. So, it seemed logical for it to be the last chapter of this part before the winemaking chapters begin.
Making a wine that reflects terroir is the ultimate compliment the winemaker can pay to the land. Throughout my winemaking career I have tried to craft wines that are capable of allowing terroir to express itself. I believe that this chapter is one of the most interesting and original pieces of writing in the book. Versions and portions of this chapter have appeared elsewhere, but this one has benefited from additional attention both from me and my erstwhile editor, Alyson Kuhn.
This chapter also concludes the free portion of my book. The final section on winemaking will be sent to paid subscribers only beginning in a few weeks.
I will continue to publish free material as well. Most will be on the general topic of wine, but I may weave in some of my other passions as well.
“No other major civilization in Europe or elsewhere has ever valued the soil more than the French or associated it more intimately with the good.”
- Armand Fremont
Terroir
Terroir is a characteristic of a group of wines. The term terroir originates from the French word for soil. Terroir is a regional characteristic, and individual bottles contribute to it without having it per se. A bottle of wine reflects terroir without containing it. Not all wines are capable of expressing terroir.
Although no less authoritative a wine writer than Jancis Robinson has called terroir an untranslatable French term, I beg to differ. It is one of the metaconcepts of fine wine. And—like so many of the most interesting aspects of wine—it resists a simple definition. Though a subtle and elusive quarry, it is no less real because of that. It is certainly not exclusively the province of French winegrowers or thinkers. The best scientific work on terroir to date was a long-term study by a group of German researchers studying Riesling in the early aughts.[1] Many misconceptions continue to circulate as to what constitutes terroir, and there is even less consensus as to what a simple definition would consist of.
Recent discussions of terroir have been of greater interest to producers, critics and academics than to consumers. For terroir to be perceived, any wine must be relatively free of flaws and consistent from bottle to bottle. It appears to be most closely associated with wine’s aromas, and it has been demonstrated scientifically more often in whites than reds. The modern concept and system of appellation is underlaid and supported by the notion of terroir, and a brief history of the development of appellation will help to show how terroir arose as a theory in fine wine. Part and parcel of this is also a discussion of how critical writing on wine arose historically.
A brief history of the concept
Terroir is a relatively recent word even in France, its country of origin. In English-speaking countries, our understanding of the word is even younger. The general concept that different regions make wines of variable type and quality stretches back 4,000 years. In the pre-classical world of ancient Egypt, wine was recorded as coming from various locations and was classified into at least two categories of quality. By the time of the Roman Empire, we know that fortunes were being squandered on food and wine, but little discussion of their relative quality survives. Given the proclivities of winemakers, we can assume that from the beginnings they observed that some sites produced better wines than others. Wine as we think of it today was a seasonal and ephemeral experience to the ancients Wine as it is generally made today emphasizing fruit character was likely only available briefly after the harvest, given what we know about the storage and preservation techniques of the time. The well-documented practice in ancient times of adding flavorings and water to wine indicates a drink that was not all that attractive in and of itself.
By reviewing developments in several areas—wine law, wine criticism, and technology—we can get a general sense of how terroir became important as a concept in the 20th Century. Wine laws and wine criticism are the two main areas that support the existence of and aided the development of the idea. Some technical developments were needed before quality was consistent enough for terroir to be observed. Most of the changes that allowed terroir to emerge originated in the 19th century.
It is extremely difficult to find any specific comparative writing about wine prior to 1800. This does not mean that comparisons were not made, only that they were not deemed crucial enough to have been recorded. This began to change in 1816, when André Jullien, a Burgundian topographer, published his encyclopedia examining wine regions, varieties and relative quality.[2] Julien worked in the wine trade, which from the beginning has been the breeding ground of some of the best thinking and writing about wine. In his encyclopedia, he not only described regions and their wines, but also, and most importantly, utilized a ranking system of five quality levels within a region. His categorization of Bordeaux properties had a large effect on the subsequent seminal 1855 classification, which has survived in modified form to this day.
It is no accident that in the 1820s the first machine capable of molding glass bottles was developed in England. For an aspect as subtle as terroir to be revealed and accepted, a container was required in which wine could be protected and preserved while navigating the normal channels of commerce. The cork-stoppered bottle was just that vessel.
Shortly after Julien’s work in France, British journalist Cyrus Redding published A History and Description of Modern Wines in London in 1833. His was the first important wine book published in English. He included details on the production of wine as well as on the quality of the wines themselves. While Redding fancied himself a poet, his contemporaries preferred his writing on wine and it is this which has carved out his niche in history.
The 19th century also saw the publication of many books on specific wine regions, including Jules Lavelle’s landmark Histoire des Vins de la Cote d’Or in 1855, the same year as the Bordeaux classification. In some ways, Lavelle’s book, though not as well-known as the Bordeaux classification, was more important from the perspective of terroir. In it, he observes the connection between the soil and the expression of flavor, which is a central tenet of terroir. Lavelle, a professor of medicine at the University of Dijon—still a premier center of oenological research—also published works on botany.[3] Most early wine publications that dealt with specific regions were largely statistical in nature, rarely including judgments of relative or comparative quality of the wines. Travel guides to wine regions were the most popular wine publications through the 19th century, and the appetite for this class of wine books has not diminished over time.
Beginning with the legal designation of certain sub-regions of the Douro in Portugal in 1750, governments began the demarcation of appellations. Over the next 150 years, the wine trade routinely paid more for wine from certain sub-regions than others—up to three times the price paid for ordinary wine of the region. It was also during this period that the average citizen first had access to good wine. Naturally, unsurprisingly, the wealthy and the aristocracy who wished for better quality wine supported the classification and demarcation of the best sites.[4] Wine was largely categorized by price, and this in turn led to widespread fraud. In response to this, producers in both Chablis and the Medoc formed syndicates in 1900 to protect their reputations for quality and price.[5] Champagne, which was frequently the victim of fraud was an early adopter of a trade syndicate as well. The French government followed the lead of the producers and began enacting laws to protect the quality of agricultural products in 1905. This led to the AOC regulation of appellations in the late 1930s, codifying the vineyards of France.
In the early 20th century, wine writing evolved as well. In England, writers such as H. Warner Allen, emerged from the wine trade and began reporting in depth on the quality of individual producers and wines. Andre Simon served a similar role in the United States. In many ways this period of wine writing, from the turn of the century until the 1970s, was a golden age characterized by highly literate and urbane writers with deep knowledge and connoisseurship based on their experiences in the wine trade. Even today a hundred years along it remains worthwhile spending time with their books.
In the 1960s and ’70s, both Germany and Italy enacted appellation control systems or significantly reformed their wine regulations. Their systems were primarily focused on assurances of origin and authenticity and less on the grading of wines within regions, as was applied to the most prestigious French appellations. It is no surprise that the concept of terroir arose in France where gradations of quality within regions also had its origin. Appellation systems offer support to the concept of terroir that sites have specific unique flavor effects, and that a hierarchy can be established between similar sites. These systems show association, but do not constitute a direct proof of terroir in the scientific sense. That would have to wait until the very end of the 20th century and the beginnings of the 21st to be proven under the rigorous standards of modern science.
Terroir in France
The concept of terroir has existed in France from as early as the 17th century. Olivier de Serres, an agriculturist of the time, stated, “The fundamental task in agriculture is the understanding of the nature of their terroir.” The idea was further elaborated during the 19th century, a period in which there was great interest in all aspects of geography. Geographer Vidal de la Blanche was instrumental in the elaboration of many of the concepts linking soil with the culture of cuisine. The creation of the Cru in Bordeaux for the 1855 Paris Exhibition was a natural outgrowth of this interest in categorizing sites by quality.
The battles over establishing and protecting the relative commercial values of specific regions through the appellation system further strengthened the idea that a wine is more than a product with certain characteristics, but rather an expression of a unique combination of soil and region. While this undoubtedly has economic value to the producers and landowners, it would be cynical to attribute the development of the ideas solely to their commercial advantages.[6] It was no accident that wine was the product that inspired the creation of the appellation system, though other products such as cheeses and olive oil would follow. A wine shows the character of its origin when carefully crafted, and it is stable, developing slowly enough to allow the time to compare and consider that character.
Terroir in English
While the word itself has been used since the 1400s to refer to the soil of an area, the use of the word terroir in English to convey a sense of the ecology of flavor or the typicity of site began in the late 20th century. When you look at wine publications in English from the 1960s and ’70s, such as Hugh Johnson’s or any of the other important writers, terroir receives no mention whatsoever. The only mention in English that I am aware of through the ’70s was Michael Broadbent’s mistaken use of it as a term for dirty or unpleasantly earthy wine. In the 1980s, a more correct use of the term was starting to emerge, especially in books about Burgundy. Their authors made reference to terroir as “the influence of the soil.” With time, the concept expanded to encompass not just the soil but all the specifics of the site as influences. Some of this confusion is of course semantic, as we use terroir to describe both the flavors resulting from the site, and the unique characteristics of the site itself. Terroir can be used correctly to describe both the physical characteristics of the site and the flavor expression in the wine that results from the site.
Matt Kramer defined terroir as “somewhereness” in his important book Making Sense of Burgundy. Andrew Jefford calls it “placeness.” While both of these are succinct and essentially the same, they don’t say enough. Peter Sichel says it better when he states, “Character is determined by terroir; quality is determined largely by man.” By the early 1990s, John Gladstone’s definition in Viticulture and Environment accurately defined terroir from a viticulturist’s point of view as “the total natural environment of the vine.” It was a short step from here to expand the definition to refer to the suite of flavors produced by a unique environment, at which point the English-speaking world and the French were in agreement as to what terroir is.
Proving terroir
Terroir as a concept is well established, but still ambiguous. For quite a long time, terroir—somewhat like belief in God or biodynamics—had to be taken on faith. When I began making wine in the late 1970s most new world winemakers were more convinced that climate and technique were the predominant factors underpinning quality in fine wine. The French’s obsession with soil seemed quaint at the time, and their generally antiquated winemaking was part and parcel of the distain that was felt for their concepts. Fortunately winemaking forces one to constantly question basic precepts, and it is now rare to find a good winemaker worldwide who does not believe to some degree or another that terroir exists.
It is important to state what terroir is not as well. It is certainly not expressed by all types of wine. It is not the universal armature that supports fine wine. Certain technical and stylistic decisions can obscure it even in wines where the expression of terroir is possible.
Anecdotal evidence of terroir
The concept of terroir would not have arisen without some basis in fact. I am sure that, since the earliest winemaking, producers mentally associated certain sites with certain characteristics in flavor. One of the strongest arguments supporting this is the economic one. Burgundy, one of the world’s oldest winegrowing areas, is a prime example. In Burgundy, there are tenfold price differences in wine produced from neighboring plots of land that have similar, if not identical, viticultural and enological treatments. It seems unlikely that this would have happened without some real differences between the wines based on their exact and specific location. And what differs between the locations is primarily soil. This pricing phenomenon exists in many other winegrowing regions as well.
It is worth examining some specific tastings and producer-based trials before moving on to look at the scientific studies supporting terroir. I recall some tastings in the early 1990s that were personally illuminating to me about the nature of terroir. The Carneros Quality Alliance had been invited by the California Wine Institute to host a group from the Japan Sommelier Society. We were asked to present California Pinot Noirs to this group of professional tasters. Acacia, where I worked at that time, was the hosting winery, and several other local winemakers joined me in the tasting. We presented three flights of six wines each. The wines were grouped by region, six each from Carneros, Russian River, and Central Coast. All were from the same vintage, selected from the top producers of the region. When the wines were tasted as groups it was apparent to all tasters that there was a regional flavor or terroir that distinguished or identified each group. Yet, the next day, when the same wines were re-tasted in a random blind array by the local winemakers who had participated in the first tasting, none of these winemakers could identify with certainty which wine was from where even though they had tasted all of them just the prior day. The regional terroir that had been obvious when the wines were poured in groups was too subtle an effect to allow the winemakers to identify the individual wines when they were “decoupled.” If we had only tasted these wines in random blind flights, we would have concluded that there was no regional terroir that you could plausibly group them under. Yet, we all recognized that terroir when tasting the wines as regional groups. I concluded from this that the regional terroir did exist, but that it was a property of a group of wines and not of a single wine. And furthermore, that the expression of terroir was subtle, and difficult to discern in any one wine with any certainty.
I had a similar experience when I began tasting in Burgundy. After a day spent in Volnay, followed by tastings in Pommard and Beaune, I felt like I knew and could recognize the terroir of these villages, yet I also knew that if I were given a random wine from any one of them blind, my chances of correctly identifying it would be slim. I began to be much more circumspect in my use of the word terroir, while still believing it to be real.
I am aware of several instances in which winegrowers traded grapes in order to informally test whether it was the source of the fruit or the hand of the winemaker that was dominant. In Burgundy, it was observed that Volnay made in Gevrey ended up tasting more like Volnay where the wine was made than like Gevrey where the grapes were from. This effect could be termed the sociology of terroir. There is an old saying that we learn how to farm by looking over the fences of our neighbors. The same can be said of winemaking. A local community of winemakers will over time come to an informal consensus on the best way to make wine, and what the local wine is supposed to taste like. This consensus is never absolute, but does have an influence on the general style. We are social creatures by nature, and this sociological aspect of terroir should not be overlooked.
Similar casual tests of terroir were made over the years in California as well, with mixed results at best. The most comprehensive of these was certainly The Cube Project. This was undertaken beginning in 2010 by three wineries: Bouchaine Napa, Anne Amie in Oregon, and Lincourt in the Central Coast of California. Each year for three consecutive vintages, each winery would harvest a selected block of Pinot Noir and send portions to the other two wineries, keeping a portion for themselves. The choice of picking date was determined by the winemaker on site, so that aspect of winemaking was constant for each site each year. All three winemakers made wines from all three locations each year. There were no constraints imposed on the style of the individual winemakers. So, for each vintage, nine wines were made, which could then be compared. This was continued over three harvests so that vintage variations could be taken into account, for a total of twenty-seven wines. This project was conceived at the Steamboat Pinot Noir Conference, which has been held at the Steamboat Inn in Oregon for three decades. The resulting wines were shown as they appeared and at other winemaker technical conferences and assorted consumer and trade tastings.
It is difficult to summarize a project this complex in a few sentences, but some of the resulting observations support other work on terroir being done under scientifically controlled conditions. In 2010, the initial year, winemaking seemed to outweigh the effects of location. The following year saw the opposite, with the vineyard sites overwhelming the effects of the winemaking. It was consistently noted that seemingly slight differences in winemaking led to profound effects on the expression of terroir. The flavors of the wine were dynamic, especially in their youth, and with bottle age, the terroir seemed to show more clearly. The specific conditions of the fruit in each vintage informed the winemaking decisions and the winemaking changed the wine’s expression of the vineyard flavor, amplifying the vintage’s effects on terroir as a result.
When these wines were presented to professional tasters in blind random order, the vast majority of tasters could not “solve” the matrix of which wines were from a particular terroir or winemaker’s hand. This was similar to the more general tasting by the Japanese sommeliers cited above.
Scientific evidence
The scientific reality of terroir was first demonstrated by qualitative studies, using descriptive sensory analysis as the chosen method. Researchers asked if certain words could be used reliably to describe wines from one region compared to another. Several studies found this to be the case—and this constitutes a qualitative proof of terroir. In 1995, another level of proof emerged when a cooperative research project between the Carneros Quality Alliance and Enologix, a private wine consulting company, demonstrated the first quantitative proof of terroir.[7] A group of winemakers were used as the expert tasters. Ten terms for aroma of the wines were developed and then analysis of the wines’ volatile chemistry was carried out. Statistical analysis confirmed that the concentrations of the chemical compounds correlated with the descriptive sensory analysis, showing the regional distinctiveness and differences between wines from the various appellations examined. Research such as this, where both sensory analysis and chemical analysis of flavor correlate with region, is the gold-standard proof of terroir. This was the first such study to accomplish this, and in essence was the first robust scientific proof for a hitherto ill-defined concept that had been fermenting for many years.
Scientific work has continued on terroir. If we look at only those studies where both qualitative and quantitative data agree, almost all of the proofs have been accomplished when white wines were studied. One of the few such studies finding terroir in reds was conducted using French Grenache, acknowledged to be a lighter aroma-driven red wine. It appears that terroir is expressed by aroma, and that it is a characteristic expressed more lucidly in lighter bodied wines. Most of the studies examining the phenomena in red wines failed to find evidence of terroir. This conclusion from a French study examining terroir utilizing Cabernet is typical, “Terroir is not a permanent combination. Rather it is an effect overridden by vintage and climatic effects.”[8] Another French study has one of my favorite titles of all time: “Typicality Related to Terroir from a Conceptual Perceptual Representation – Study of Links with Enological Practices.” Its conclusions were threefold and quite enlightening.
1. Different conceptions of the ideal wine by winemakers makes consensus of style impossible.
2. At the same time all appellations within France are supposed to be based on a supposed consensus of ideal regional flavor.
3. When tested with red wine in this instance winemaking influences overwhelmed the geographical influences (terroir).
Conclusions such as this appear to call into question the entire French AOC system, especially in the case of red wine. Rather than being hasty,[9] let’s examine other factors that bear consideration. Modern winemaking has made for far tastier wine in general. There are definitely fewer flawed wines, which should make terroir more visible, as there are fewer off-notes to obscure it. But counteracting this development is the present-day winemaker’s ability to make fuller, riper red wines. Because terroir seems to be expressed best by aroma in wines with low extract, the trends of modern red winemaking towards fuller, riper, and more extracted wines reduce the likelihood of terroir being expressed.[10] For many red wines, the concept of terroir has become antiquated. The French AOC system and the concepts of terroir and cru[11] that are at its foundation were developed during a time when red wines were lighter and far less ripe than present day wines. Advances in winegrowing have made for a different landscape, one where terroir is not evident in many red wines. This does not preclude its persistence in more elegant, classically structured wines.
There have been, and continue to be, attempts to quantify terroir through mechanistic models and the concept of terroir units. The multivariate and subtle nature of terroir has so far hobbled these efforts, and seems destined to continue to defy them into the foreseeable future.
Soil versus other influences
The word terroir originates from the French word for soil. In the traditional winegrowing areas of France, there has long been an association perceived between soil and flavor. In many parts of the New World, a contrary belief held that climate and winemaking techniques were the dominant factors in creating specific flavor styles, and that soil’s influence was far less important. As we have seen in the preceding discussions, both points of view have validity. New World winemakers realized that technique can be the dominant force in a wine’s flavor. Certain European winemakers knew that it didn’t have to be, and when it wasn’t, the more subtle effects of soil could be showcased.
For many decades, the study of soils—pedology—did not yield specific connections or proofs of terroir, yet the belief in the primacy of soils as the basis of terroir endured. Part of this conflict or confusion was the misplaced conception that mineral elements of the soil could be selectively taken up and directly influence the flavor of the wine. The idea was, for example, that a slate soil could somehow create a slate aroma in the wine. This is patently impossible, both from the perspective of plant physiology and the human physiology of flavor perception. All effects of soil on flavor are secondary, as are the effects of other aspects of the site. The only primary flavor effects of a site would be in the case of contamination, such as a grove of eucalyptus trees that permeated the vines with their aromatic oil and directly influenced the flavor of the wine.
Recent work in Germany utilizing Riesling seems to indicate that soil may very well be the most important influence in the expression of terroir. This work was done under the direction of Ulrich Fischer and performed primarily by Andrea Bauer. Numerous scientific publications resulted from it, as well as articles about it in the wine media. Riesling was chosen for its known ability to express location. The fact that the wines are not normally influenced by oak or malolactic flavors was also considered beneficial for this type of research. The work began in 2004 in the Pfalz and was expanded to other winegrowing areas in 2005. Sites were chosen in diverse regions that shared similar specific soil types. Wines made under controlled conditions by the researchers and wines made under undirected winery conditions were both studied. Tastings were performed by groups of professional tasters. The sensory protocols used were impeccable. The findings confirmed that soil type is one of the most dominant influences on aroma and flavor.
In essence, they found that the flavors of wines made from similar soils located far apart geographically had more in common than wines made from dissimilar soil types located close together. This effect was found over multiple vintages and held true both in wine made under normal commercial conditions as well as in wines made under controlled laboratory conditions. This demonstrated that there are aspects of the site—notably the soil type—that are not obscured by individual winemakers’ vinification techniques or by vintage variation. This is an extremely robust proof of the influence of the soil on terroir.
They also analyzed 46 volatile compounds and found clear grouping of these compounds by soil type notwithstanding significant variations caused by vintage and vinification. This quantitative chemical analysis confirms and supports the sensory analysis. This to my knowledge is the first work of its kind to find direct flavor correlations and the corresponding chemical compounds with soil type. It was common even a few years ago to hear it said with certainty that the effects of soil are secondary on flavor. This research found that soil similarity is equal to aroma similarity, and that this trumps the soil’s location. That is, a soil in the Mosel will give the same aroma as the same soil in the Rhinepfalz. This was true when the winemaking was controlled under laboratory conditions, and also held true when there were differences in winemaking.
Another study conducted in 1998 by the same principal author found that when wines from two vintages, five producers, and six vineyard designations were compared in a sensory study of Rheingau Riesling, that only in some of the vineyards was terroir the dominant element. In other vineyards, the terroir effect was overwhelmed by vintage and winemaking technique. This supports the idea that terroir is both subtle and specific and does not exist in all locations and every circumstance, even in wines such as German Rieslings, which are known to be capable of expressing terroir.
Chloe Roullier-Gall, working in Burgundy, has been investigating analytical differences between Pinot Noir wines produced by the same winery from specific climats that are close together geographically and are on similar soil types. This is a quest for the existence of the most subtle aspect of terroir. While the research is still in its early stages, Roullier-Gall’s team found that under these constraints the terroir effect is small in comparison to the vintage effect. This corroborates what other researchers have found. Another intriguing aspect of their research has been that the terroir effect in these wines is less evident in young wines and that it takes a few years of bottle age before the terroir effects can be demonstrated chemically. This echoes the observations made during The Cube project discussed under practical investigations of terroir.
Work done by Victoria Carey and her group in Stellenbosch, South Africa, utilizing both Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc, points to the primary role of environmental versus management practices when thinking about terroir. Her group studied more than twenty sites over seven vintages and analyzed the effects of all environmental and management practices on the expression of terroir. With the exception of clone in Sauvignon Blanc and crop yield in Cabernet, all significant factors relating to wine character were found to be environmental, that is to say terroir-based. Gonzalez-Centeno, investigating regional character in Spain over four distinct regions using Merlot and Cabernet and multiple vintages, found that the regional grouping was more agro-climatic than varietal. So in this case the regional character overcame even the varietal effect itself.
In addition to work done with the flavor and chemistry of finished wines, there has been research aimed at finding terroir in grapes and must. In this work, huge numbers of compounds are analyzed and patterns of correlations searched for. Most of this work has been done with red wine varieties. When single vintages have been looked at, the correlations have been found mainly by producer and vintage and not by region. This supports much of the work done on wine. However, when multiple vintages are investigated, patterns begin to emerge. A study based on a single clone of Corvina grown in the Verona area of Italy followed seven vineyards over three years, and the pattern of correlations supported distinct terroirs. I find it interesting that no single strong link could be found to any one aspect, such as soil or viticultural practices, but rather the linkage was to general conditions of the vineyard.
Other research on levels of stilbenes such as resveratrol found in red grapes have shown over multiple studies that terroir effects were greater than enological or varietal effects. In general, these studies of grapes have found that flavonoids, anthocyanins, and sesquiterpenes are the classes of compounds that tend to cluster around geographical loci.
Sarah Knight and Matthew Goddard, working with New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, have proposed that populations of saccharomyces that are regionally specific may play a role in the terroir expression of uninoculated wines. They have hypothesized and have published results showing that this may be possible. They have published data from only one vintage at this point, and used only chemical analysis of micro-fermentations without any sensory work or commercial scale wines. Given what is known about the variation in strains of saccharomyces from vintage to vintage, and from ferment to ferment within the same vintage in the same wineries, this idea will obviously need further study, as a terroir effect must be one that persists over vintages.
In white wines in general, and in Sauvignon Blanc in particular, yeast plays an inordinately large role in the flavors of the wine, and this argues for a role for yeast in the definition of terroir. Many definitions of terroir already include the influence of the vintner, and perhaps the role of yeast is best left as an aspect of the vintner’s contribution to terroir.
[1] Andrea Bauer and Ulrich Fischer’s decades-long research into the subject of terroir will be dealt with at length later in this chapter.
[2] Topographie de tous les vignobles connus
[3] When considering the accomplishments of 19th century polymaths such as Lavelle, one might wonder if today’s world offers an excess of pleasurable distractions.
[4] Prior to the political and social upheavals of the 18th century the ownership of the best sites was largely in the hands of the aristocracy and the church and not available to the middle class or the ordinary citizen.
[5] It is interesting to contemplate that the producers themselves were the first to mobilize to protect the quality of their wines, and their actions in turn mobilized the French government. While consumers in modern times are often suspicious of producers with regard to purity and quality, such skepticism may be misplaced in the case of wine.
[6] Joseph Capus, an agronomy professor from the Gironde, was instrumental in developing the AOC system in the 1930s. He believed that the main flaw of the AOC was that it addressed only provenance, whereas an assessment of both quality and authenticity was equally necessary. Authenticity is used here in the sense of typicity or trueness to type, which is one of the pillars that support terroir.
[7] S.P. Arrhenius, L.P. McCloskey and M. Sylvan: Chemical Markers for Aroma of Vitis vinifera Var. Chardonnay Regional Wines, J. Agric. Food Chem. 1996 44(4) pp 1085-90. The publication of this study in such a highly regarded peer-reviewed scientific journal is a testament to its validity. Not everyone took kindly to terroir being demonstrated as a verifiable fact for these wine regions. Matt Kramer, whose writings on terroir had intrigued me, seemed particularly miffed that it was proven. For him, terroir was a quasi-mystical aspect of Burgundy, and I think he felt that its scientific proof somehow diminished it. I was surprised, as I thought he would have been as delighted as a Jesuit who had been informed that God’s existence had been scientifically proven. Perhaps it was the fact that it was proven utilizing California Chardonnay instead of Burgundy that was disappointing to him.
[8] It is interesting to note that even when terroirit was not found, the author presumes its existence and states that it (terroir) was overridden, r. Rather than simply stating that it did not exist.
[9] It is not as if there are no studies in red wine demonstrating terroir. As just one example, in 2012, A.L. Robinson et al in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture found that ten Cabernet regions in Australia could be distinguished from each other based on sensory descriptors. This study notwithstanding, it is true that where both sensory and chemical markers have been discovered, they have been almost exclusively in white wines.
[10] Very ripe wines tend towards a more generic flavor profile and away from the specific and distinctive. An exceedingly ripe Pinot Noir for example may be easily mistaken for Syrah or Zinfandel. It is impossible for a Pinot to express terroir if it doesn’t even taste like Pinot Noir. This dulling-down of varietal-specific flavor may also be one of the reasons that modern red wines do not seem to express terroir. The average level of tannin in red wines has also increased over the last few decades. This is concomitant with the increase in color density. It is well understood that wines with higher levels of tannin are less aromatic due to the reductive strength of the tannins. This also blocks the expression of terroir, as aroma is the primary grammar of terroir.
[11] Cru, is a concept very similar to terroir, which developed in Bordeaux. Vedel describes it as; “A zone in which all the products share unique characteristics, or are different from those of neighboring soil.” Unlike terroir, cru takes into account the reputation and the marketing of the wines. There have been regional interpretations of these concepts from the beginning. Emile Peynaud, another product of Bordeaux’s wine culture, associated terroir strictly with the soil, excluding other influences of the site.
Once again an enlightening and well written chapter of a much discussed but little understood concept. Thanks!
Excellent discussion of what is assuredly the most complicated aspect of wine, terroir. Because our experience of terroir arises from its expression in wine, through visual, olfactory and organoleptic character, it is by definition an incredibly complex quality of wine. Your review of the history of the concept of terroir was very thorough, showing that the attempt to explain terroir has vexed many in the wine community for hundreds of years, with a satisfactory definition of terroir still seeming unachieved. What a marvelous thing wine is, that it's essential character is so admired, leading to so much devotion, yet leaving all of us struggling to explain why it is what it is. I really enjoyed this chapter, and will be thinking of it for a while. Thank you for sharing this with us.