Felicity Carter, Editor-in-Chief of Meininger’s Wine Business International, has penned a thought-provoking article about terroir – and whether terroir can be pronounced even in really bad wines. It’s also quite entertaining.
She recounts ordering a glass of chardonnay in a German hotel that “tastes of nothing. It’s offensively blank… it has a vague and unpleasant greenness to it, with hints of water and oxidation.” She wonders aloud to a colleague if it really is chardonnay. He tastes it and pronounces it to be chardonnay from Venezia.
Why?
“I did years of supermarket tastings, and that’s what cheap Chardonnay from that area tastes like,” he explains. …
“And the grapes from there… typical Uta,” he says, using the German term for ‘prematurely aged’. “Also that kind of nothing aftertaste. That’s typical.”
Watery? Uta? Nothingness? Maybe that’s terroir right there.
… > [M]aybe if grapes are grown in a certain place, and mistreated a certain way, they end up with a specific taste. Which they wouldn’t have if grown and mistreated somewhere else.
This got her thinking about other regions:
As a student, I drank buckets of cheap, woody Australian Chardonnay. The kind of wine that’s made with irrigated grapes that are picked and tortured in an oak-chip strewn factory. The kind of wine that epitomises “bland wine from anywhere”. …
Except it can’t. Chardonnay from Australia’s hot irrigated Riverland area doesn’t speak of terroir, so much as scream and shout it. It’s raucous and I can spot it anywhere.