Terroir or not terroir? That is the question!

By Ross Workman

Terroir or not terroir? That is the question!

Don’t bother to look it up. Probably all you’ll find is that it is a French word for soil. But in the wine world it is a whole lot more than that. Expansively, it can mean the sum total of all the physical factors affecting a vineyard, including soil type, minerals therein, slope, angle to the sun, water table and drainage, daily, seasonal and annual weather patterns and just about anything else you can think of. The idea is that this vineyard is unique, unlike any other, impossible to replicate, sui generis and, therefore, the grapes and the wine coming from this vineyard are similarly unique. The wine has a sense of the place whence it came.

The believers in this almost metaphysical concept, and there are many, believe they can tell whether the wine has this sense of place. And these are not idiots; a great many of the most famous wine experts in the world are firm believers in terroir. Fanatics is not too strong a word. So it is worth trying to understand just how terroir works.

I hasten to confess I am not blessed with a gift for terroir. I love wine. Drink it every day. Usually more than once. Taste it blind every week. Have been doing it for decades. Take a lot of academic wine classes. Read volumes about it. But I just don’t get terroir. I’m a terroir agnostic, not an atheist. I don’t deny it exists; I just can’t tell if it does. I do not have the faith. And I kind of wish I did because the terroirists are getting something out of the wine that I am not.

When I drink wine I try to apply all of my senses to it. I look at its color, clarity, refractivity -- anything I can see. I smell it to sniff out all the aromas and bouquet (those are different, but that’s another story) that I can match against my smell memory bank, or I find myself charmed by ones I cannot identify. In my mouth, after the immediate first impression (aka “attack”), there are temperature, sweetness, bitterness, astringency, viscosity (aka “weight”), and texture to deal with, as well as flavors. I swallow it and contemplate the duration and character of the aftertaste (aka “finish”).

If you think about it, there are a hell of a lot of impressions and assessments of the wine that you can gather from the glass in your hand. What stumps me is identifying the sense of place in the wine. When I focus on analyzing it instead of just enjoying it, my senses tell me a lot of things about the wine itself, but they don’t tell me much about the vineyard. I can’t smell or taste the slope, drainage, wind direction, annual rainfall, etc. that make up the terroir. And if you can, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

This starts to get important when we get to the question of whether wine is better if it comes from a single place or results from blending wines from more than one place. For the terroirist, blending wines from different places erases a valuable element that he prizes. The non-terroirist, on the other hand, says “Hey, if the winemaker can make it taste better by putting in it something from here and there and there, then go for it!”

Since the wine world is filled with people making wine both ways, there is sort of a philosophical divide here. And it is not always a matter of free choice. Some countries, notably France and Italy, have enacted laws governing what is permitted to be blended with what in certain locations and circumstances. Truth-in-labeling laws almost everywhere govern what you can call the stuff depending on what you’ve put in it. Aussies have a charming way around that regulation and sell a lot of their wine without labels.

My guess is most people care a lot more about how the wine tastes to them than whether the winemaker respected or ignored the dictates of terroir. But our betters, the experts who judge, rate, write about and recommend wines for a living, often hold the concept of terroir as the sine qua non of a truly great wine. If it lacks that ephemeral sense of place, it can’t be great. And, since a lot of us lesser beings can’t taste the sense of place, we have to rely on their pronouncements of what is great and not great. More important matters than the quality of a bottle of wine have hinged on the truth revealed only to the anointed. Remember the Aztec high priests sacrificing virgins, perhaps slightly used, because they knew what was required to get a good corn crop.

Like so many other human foibles he exposed, Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels wrote about the philosophical divide between the Big-endians in Lilliput who made it a matter of conscience to break their eggs at the big end and the heretical Little-endians who broke theirs on the small end. Maybe “terroir or not terroir?” is just such a meaningless question. Unless you are blessed with the gift of tasting places in your wine. Or feel more comfortable if a high priest guides you to Truth and Greatness.

Cheers!

Ross Workman