Seconded.
If you have more thoughts, please expand on them, William. Much appreciated.
I think terroir is more complex and has more ‘interesting’ dimensions than any particular set of winemaking decisions can encompass, so the best you can hope for is to have the experience/knowledge/intuition to make the right & interesting ones for that vineyard in that vintage.
This!
And not all winemakers have the same financial resources…
That’s no surprise, since there is no clear definition of the term ‘terroir’. Everyone can define the term as they please. Inevitably, any discussion regarding ‘terroir’ suffers from this major shortcoming. Moreover, this term is often misused as a simple marketing tool, which makes the matter even more problematic.
I’m also in the boat that says that human is one part of terroir when discussing wine. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the wine needs to feel like it is “made” - the best winemakers can make the terroir shine clearly without any obvious human influence. To me, that is the best expression of terroir in a wine, but even that needs a skilled human to be a part of the process. Change the person here and you might yield a different, less impressive wine.
However, I find it weird when everybody is talking only about winemaking, whereas viticulture should be a key point here as well. One doesn’t do much with top-class vineyards if they don’t know how to maximize its potential. A skilled viticulturalist might produce grapes capable of making more impressive wine from a less great vineyard than a less skilled viticulturalist from a greater vineyard.
Fascinating discussion. I always thought that the concept of terroir encompassed the nature portion of the nature/nurture equation in the creation of a wine, while human intervention (both in the vineyard and the winery) accounted for the nurture component. Very cool to read the perspective of winemakers on both of these essential components.
Humans interpret terroir through their winemaking. They are not inherently part of the terroir. That’s at least how it has always made sense to me. The dirt is the score. The winemaker is the orchestra manager and conductor. The score does not change.
We also have to take into the count the taster. They are never impartial. A Lodi Zinfandel will almost always be judged a lesser wine than a Sonoma Zinfandel, whether it actually is or not. This feeds a bias loop that muddles things and mixes things even further, and site specifics get valued higher in this melee, because you’ve been conditioned by peers to think Sonoma has better soil than Lodi.
Likewise, I know making Mission going in, that even if I made the best wine in the world, it will never be judged equal to a more prestigious grape like PN or CS. Only in a blind tasting would a lesser prestigious grape encounter no bias, but that’s not how wines are reviewed or tasted. If you make PN in Russian River, and almost no matter how it turns out, you can count on high scores. Because the pedigree is there and pedigree is what tends to get rewarded.
Yes, the score does not change, but the ‘terroir’, whatever the definition, is subject to permanent change and not an unchangeable constant. It is a living ecosystem, occupied by plants, insects, and micro-organisms, exposed to the weather, and cultivated by humans. Without humans no ‘terroir’ comes into being.
John,
You are right…a little thread drift here.
I think that if you applied the exact same winemaking techniques to ten different vineyards, there would be winners and losers.
Adam makes a very good point that tasters bring their prejudices to the table. I remember blind tastings in the 70s when --tasting blind–people would love the Chorey. With the labels in view folks preferred the wines from the more famous vineyards.
Rudi is spot on…without human endeavor terroir does not exist…whatever terroir may be,
A great terroir becomes great only when vines are planted there. If they are free-growing wild vines with no human intervention whatsoever, I doubt they will produce a wine of real distinction. I think it’s just different schools whether a winemaker is part of the equation in terroir, but a viticulturalist is definitely one key component in terroir being capable or producing exceptional grapes.
I am more inclined to include the vineyard manager/viticulturist than someone who is exclusively a winemaker.
But the dirt (and its natural environment) is still the basis of terroir. The rest is interpretation.
I think that if you applied the exact same winemaking techniques to ten different vineyards, there would be winners and losers.
That was the OP’s question.
I remember blind tastings in the 70s when --tasting blind–people would love the Chorey. With the labels in view folks preferred the wines from the more famous vineyards.
That is the OP’s answer.
If terroir is so important, you would think it comes through no matter what grapes or blends are used and no matter who makes them. On a macro scale, perhaps that’s true, in that a vineyard in the Yukon is unlikely to produce great wine from any grape or any wine maker, because grapes can’t grow there well enough to make wine. But in areas where grapes can grow well, Wes and Mel pointed out what happens with different wine makers. So it would seem to me that the most important components in any of this are the viticulture and wine making. If you ripped out all the Pinot Noir and planted Sagrantino in Burgundy, would the “best” sites still be the best? If you change viticultural practices, you see what happened with Cronin. And if you change wine making practices, we’ve all seen what happens with different wine makers using the same vineyard.
The OP said “equivalent resources” though, he didn’t say identical wine making practices, which was a good distinction to make. Most importantly, he didn’t ask whether the wine would be tasted blind or with full knowledge of the site. My hunch is that with a good wine maker and blind tasting, most people would be pretty confused. I’ve seen a few wine makers identify the source of grapes blind, even if they didn’t know who the wine maker was. But I’ve also seen them fail to identify their own wine once in a while, and for people who aren’t as involved, it’s even harder.
Are we any closer to answering the original question (“How close can [the] get gap get, between a more hallowed terroir vs. a lesser terroir, if a winemaker put equivalent resources into both?”)? Kinda somewhat it seems like. My own view isn’t so different from what has been discussed here. Terroir matters. How much it matters is highly variable, from a huge amount to hardly anything. And wine making matters a lot, most of the time. This massive variability is one of the things that makes wine such a fun hobby - so much opportunity for discovery.
Maybe the real answer to the gap question isn’t some definitive statement about terroir vs. winemaking, but instead specific examples of wine makers, terroir, and how they handled those perceived terror quality gaps. CT might be considered a catalog of such examples, especially if you include the Pro reviews. Read any Burghound piece on a Burg vintage and it is one discussion after another of a specific wine maker and how he/she managed the differences between terroirs, and whether or not he/she closed those gaps.
Then there is the marketplace. It clearly has voted strongly and clearly. Winemaker trumps terroir. I’m not saying the market is right, or smart, but it has made clear that, within a wine producing region, Producer is the most important consideration in wine pricing. And we here at WB also have voted, as most of our discussions are about Producers first and foremost. Not to say that terroir doesn’t matter. Clearly Vosne village wines are considered a higher level than Beaune village wines (again, not right or smart, but certainly more expensive). If we wanted to know exactly how the market values Producer vs. Terroir a much better statistician than I could do a regression on these variables and produce distributions for every major wine region. Wine statisticians, have at it! But with zero effort, I’d say that on average Producer drives 70% of the price of wine, and Terroir (i.e. some market-comprehensible combination of vineyard/appellation/region/varietal) drives 40%. I know that doesn’t add up to 100% - all part of the magic of wine.
Hmm, looking at this more cynically…
If the goal is to produce a spoofulated, modern, ripe, high-octane over-oaked fruit bomb, then the same unlimited resources applied in the vineyard and winery to fruit from both lowly and exalted terroir could make the difference indistinguishable.
If the goal is to produce a wine showing minimal effects from application of modern techniques* (the definition of which is a can of worms unto itself), then what are you going to expend those resources on?
*I was going to say a wine expressive of its terroir, but I thought that might be meaningless as the definition of such a wine is dependent on human interpretation. What we consider expressive of a given terroir likely differs from what was considered the norm 100, 200, 300 years ago.
Thoughtful answer as usual. I might suggest though that one could easily prefer Chorey at 5 years(or current release) than Bonnes Mares at the same age. Grand Cru is often less enjoyable until it reaches maturity, and then it simply becomes something that I have never personally seen in Chorely Les Beaune.
Duplicate
We share a lot of opinions but not this one.
Farming is important, and having a true connection to the plant is important. But, IMO, being organic or biodynamic is not nearly as important as being personally connected to the site and plants. Seeing the vines throughout the growing season, seeing their vigor, when they start to ripen fruit, how all of the small changes in farming are translated through to the wines is, again IMO, how a winemaker can move from wines of technique to wines of terroir. But you have to be equally, or more present, in the cellar to know the wines. Without sheperding the wines through their elevage you would be very challenged to have any idea what the minute changes in caring for the plants are that separates site specific farming from universal choices(e.g. organic or biodynamic). btw-we do use organic techniques and protocols at Whistling Ridge and Temperance Hill is certified organic. Fir Crest is Live certified as well.
Organic=good
But talent is not something any organization certifies.
And terroir is all things in winegrowing. Site, climate, regional culture, etc. I have made wine in 5 different buildings and each of those buildings had it’s own “climate”. The stage of vinification and elevage is not separate from the growing stage, it’s a continuation of the growth/elevage of the wine.
We have more opportunities for controlling factors than ever before, and many producers don’t ever want to fail, so the tendency to push ripeness, and to “correct” wines keeps many producers from letting the vineyard have the dominant voice it had two hundred years ago. But many of us have that balance as our focus and goal. Even with that focus, each fermentation is it’s own unique occurrence, and much more uncontrolled than many might think.
I will never be able to make a wine that isn’t both the site and the winery as part of the terroir.
They are intrinsically linked. And once I believe in that process, it becomes easy to put down all the fancy tools and adjuncts and let the wines be the wines.
As always a thoughtful post.
Should you read my other posts on the boards, I would hope that it’s obvious that I am aware that Burgundians view themselves as making wines of site rather than varietal. At the very least through my ranting about the elevated status of French winemaker/consultants in the Willamette Valley, (when they clearly make site specific wines and honestly know little of the Willamette Valley(for now)).
In European regions where wine producing houses are often generations old, aspirations are different than in regions like the Willamette Valley, and the classification of vineyards probably does alter many producers approaches. But my post is specific to the ones aspiring to produce great wines. Ente, Coche-Dury, Rousseau, Aubert de Villaine, and many others.
Where the pricing of the village wines demonstrates a willingness to make those wines with the care and commitment they put into their GC wines, and has raised that pricing to unprecedented levels. The pricing didn’t come before the quality in these producers. Their wines demonstrated a worth beyond the classification of the Crus.
And for many on this board, those are the wines, and producers that matter to us. Even in my home region, I post about the producers setting the bar(IMO), not the main body of work.
Grape whisperer.