i remember tasting the wines of sylvain pataille a few years back. the tasting culminated with the clos du roy followed by the l’ancestrale. i then asked the man himself what steps he had taken to achieve such a striking difference between these two wines. his reply was quite funny; something to the effect that it was simply the difference in the grapes as he makes all his wines the same way in order to best transmit their true identity. any reasonably experienced taster would not find that response to be plausible, and a quick internet search will even tell you the l’ancestrale receives a good chunk of new wood. this leads me to question the notion of intention all together. i don’t want to be so pessimistic as to think all this talk of terroir and having a “hands off” approach is purely marketing or even a question of fashion. perhaps it is just that language itself is insufficiently rich to capture all the the subtleties of embodied knowledge acquired through the wine making process as well as the abstract ideals that are affixed to the aesthetic experience of wine tasting. i doubt it is possible to to convince anyone that all decisions made are purely the result of intentional action. this would not allow for any notion of intuition gained through the reiterative process. not to mention, it would dissolve the possibility of a happy accident. the ‘masterpiece’ in any creative endeavor certainly relies on some measure of these two difficult to characterize phenomena. i would argue that any mention of a “hands off” approach is simply an imperfect reference to the reflexive and subconscious intelligence gained through repeated experience. this type of intelligence is highly idiosyncratic and affords a certain latitude with execution. there are multiple paths to the same destination as well as different destinations via the same path. as far as terroir, it is simply the most easily justified aesthetic signifier. equating beauty with nature is obviously not a new advance, yet it remains the one which is most apt when speaking of wine. while society has moved far past this paradigm when discussing painting or music; wine and its collective culture does feel somewhat anachronistic where looking backwards is not viewed as devolution.
Anyone who determines the day the grapes are picked can not efface themselves from the signature in the wine.
Given a range of possible harvest dates in most years that ranges over weeks, the differences in a given year can be between <21.0 Brix fruit to >25.0 Brix. pH change could range from 3.0-3.8 which is a massive difference since pH is algorhythmic.
Producer A picks at 21.5, pH of 3.2, TA around 8g/l. Basic flavor of the fruit is red and pH maintains hues in the red color spectrum.
Producer B picks the same vineyard at 24.5 Brix, pH of 3.7, and TA of 5.0. Flavors have evolved to the black fruit spectrum, and pH gives purple hues to the wine.
Same spot in the world, but still vastly different wines. Way bigger differences. between these two wines than the impact from native or commercial yeast, or with new or neutral oak.
No matter who the winemaker is, they are the decision maker.
There’s a lot of frosting in the winemaker job, and I don’t fault anyone for trying to abstain from that. But there’s a base process you can’t escape from. I don’t say that as a rebuke, but rather with some sadness that a stream of marketing/philosophy actually has taken root enough to change the process in established areas such as Burgundy. It wasn’t that long ago that there were conversations around “Parkerizing” wines, and pretending to oneself to attempt to remove oneself from the wines seems not terribly different than that.
Hi Brady,
I disagree completely. You are very welcome to your opinion, but I feel that limiting the definition of terroir to only the dirt and climate is a simplification of it’s true definition. Somewhereness. In the wine. The wine is a composite of everything that comprises it.
Looking at historical delineations in winegrowing, regions were much more limited in communication and resources than they are today.
In Burgundy, they use barriques. Because barrels are easy to move, fit in small caves(temperature controlled without technology), could be sourced locally, and they are awesome for fermenting high acid low sugar fruit through to dryness. For Pinot Noir they used wooden vats, because those worked very well at insulating small ferments helping get them dry, were available to be built locally, and produced good results.
In Italy, it was amphora. But no amphoras in Burgundy. Vessel does make a huge difference, especially if that vessel is somewhat unique to the region. Caves, prior to our modern ability to control climate in the winery, were a perfect occurence for fermentation and storage needs of a non-industrialized wine grower. In champagne, the ability to evolve to the complex nature of non vintage blending and cellaring of tirage would only have been possible and affordable with the presence of caves(and a lot of them). While caves are technically in the dirt, they are not of the dirt and not in what I read as your definition of terroir. But they mark an outsized percentage of the great cool climate growing regions for France.
Growers in France, didn’t sort clones by scientific number, they planted what worked, the clones/plants that produced for them, and those clones prospered. Trellising is very uniform in most growing regions yet quite diverse between regions. You may not know how to identify specific trellising choices, and other farming choices, in the wines you drink but I guarantee they are there.
On the whole we look to a tiny percentage of impacts in wine and bestow upon them and outsized importance, and too often an independence within the elevage that isn’t warranted. We don’t connect new oak to alcohol levels but alcohol is an extractant and 12.5% can hold way more oak than 14.0%. Ditto stems, where the bittering aspect of stems counterbalances the sweetness of new oak and higher percentages of whole cluster, or vineyards that naturally produce more tannins, fold in higher amounts of new wood. In my opinion that is. It also extends to size of the new oak vessels as well…but that’s probably more than enough from me.
We have every luxury today: motorized equipment, pneumatic presses, weather reports, so many forms of adjustment, and the ability to handle so much more work with less people. So it becomes easier to debate the concept of terroir from a philosophical standpoint and easier for producers to play to that debate. But when the lines of terroir were actually laid down in Europe, it was hard work just to get the job done at all, and the ways people found that worked quickly became regional ways to produce wines, and very much a part of the terroir.
Marcus,
Agree, friendly disagreement.
I’ve heard Fourrier is experimenting with amphora. Let’s say their experiment goes super-well, and they and all the top domaines make the switch. Let’s suppose the resulting wines are excellent, and demonstrate the differences between the patches of land. Question, with the new vessels has the terroir changed?
By the usual definition, absolutely not. If terroir is defined as the combination of geology, soil, topography, and climate, then the terroir is still there, just expressing itself differently, because of human choices.
I think your interpretation would mean that the terroir itself changed.
I’d express it as a multi-factorial experiment. In a simple case, let’s have the end result be C, a wines character, with two factors influencing it. Let’s call on factor T for terroir, and another factor W for winemaking. You’d have a (simplified) formula something like:
C = Ti + Wj + TW ij + ε,
Where Ti are all the possible factors of terroir (substrata type, topsoil type, topsoil depth, etc, including climate factors) Wj is the set of all human decisions (new barrels, amphora, sulphur use, aging duration, etc), and TW ij is the interaction of the two factors (how does the use of amphora interact with burgundy’s limestone) and ε is all other factors not yet accounted for.
Using this model, the terroir wouldn’t need to change for burgundy to experiment with and embrace amphora. Sure the wines would change, but it would be based on the (hopefully enlightened) decisions of humans.
I feel that with your definition, terroir would change with every changing of the guard, surely far too ephemeral a definition.
Again, please don’t get me wrong, I agree with everything you wrote about history, the availability of resources, and winemaking choices, such as brix. And in the above model, those factors can have as much or more impact as terroir on the final wine. I just think a wines character can be understood without calling those terroir.
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- For the math nerds, this is a huge over-simplification of the model which would be far better represented with more than two factors, breaking the winemaking, resources, and history into many pieces. Also there should probably be a constant μ added, but I didn’t feel like explaining it.
Interesting suggestion Brady
I think Marcus would retort that for some wines your model is flawed, in that Ti and Wj don’t really exist independent of each other. Rather that Ti = Wk + Gk, Where G is wine growing with effectively the same definition as you define terroir as (substrata type, topsoil type, topsoil depth, etc, including climate factors). I struggle with whether things like vineyard management, decisions on when to pick, etc. would be considered a part of winemaking vs. terroir as I can see arguments on both sides of this.
If we look at a place Chablis vs. the rest of Burgundy, aside from differences in soil with limestone vs. kimmeridgian soil, the historical eschewing of new oak is also fundamentally tied to the "terroir” of Chablis. Or we could also look at other places like Bordeaux. One could make a Right Bank Bordeaux with a Cabernet dominant blend, or even as a single varietal, and produce a quality wine evoking a certain sense of the terroir of the site the grapes were grown, however that terroir wouldn’t really be the Right Bank of Bordeaux. There, history and winemaking tradition are intrinsically tied to a sense of place in wines there.
So in a case like Chablis, Bordeaux, and perhaps others, we could expect to see large R-squared and p values for TWij as opposed to Ti and Wj.
Hi Brady,
Terroir doesn’t change. Terroir just is.
The only thing that changes if everyone switches to amphora is a portion of the taste of the wines. Terroir isn’t about “how” a wine tastes. It’s about whether it tastes like a place. Not a place on a map though-a place with all the things that make that place specific.
There are places in Italy that look just like Oregon. Just like it. But as soon as you put an Italian in one and an Oregonian in the other you don’t need a map(sorry, GPS).
Climate is within your definition of terroir. In the past 40 years climate change has altered “how” the wines taste in Burgundy more than any shift in vessel ever would. It’s done it to every single wine produced in Burgundy.
There’s a reason Michael Chang regularly states that he doesn’t see a reason not to drink Burgundy young anymore. And I agree with him.
It still tastes like Burgundy, because it is Burgundy. This is what Burgundy tastes like. Does that mean a Burgundy afficianado who was in a coma for 38 years and suddenly woke up would recognize the wines? Probably so, but they would seem weird.
In the commonly understood definition I understand terroir to be, C=terroir. And terroir is everything that goes into it. Change is not part of it. Does Dujac Clos St. Denis taste like Jayer Echezeaux? Not really, but both taste like Burgundy, and both are relatively easy to recognize as Burgundy by regular drinker of Burgundy. So a minor change like amphoras, isn’t altering terroir. But it would be part of the make up. And if Fourrier experiments with amphora, and then no one else bothers. Then his wine may not be recognizable as Burgundy and would lack an easily understood sense of terroir(which is different than lacking terroir).
As you dial down from region to the Crus, I don’t think it’s really different.
That may not be popular, for a variety of reasons, not least that due to modern opportunities/penalties-the weight of the impact on terroir by soil is being overwhelmed by the other inputs. But it’s still the truth(as I see it.)
And the math equation: I respect it but I don’t accept it.
You don’t list yeast at all. And they are the true winemakers. Easily overlooked, but the process of fermentation is done a dis-service by dumbing yeast down to native or commercial. None of this occurs without a number of yeast in a ferment that our brains can’t comprehend, doing something that we can’t do mechanically.
In over 5000 years my job has never been at risk of new technology…
A super computer couldn’t keep track of the yeast population and dispersion in a single fermenter over the time of a single ferment. Couldn’t do it. And yeast are just one of literally millions of factors.
Wine is magic, not math. (If it was math my wines would be horrible)
With regions like Bordeaux and Burgundy, I feel that in those regions history and winemaking tradition are intrinsically tied to a recognizable sense of place. That familiarity is something we prize. It also comforts us as we look at larger and larger purchase prices for wine. With a 1000 year track record it’s easier for me to spend $300 on a bottle of wine, because I know that Clos des Lambrays will have continuity in “how” it tastes. As long as they don’t switch to amphoras…
I’m with you
Here’s a question that crossed my mind thinking about your comments though: if the winemaking traditions of a region change, does that mean that the terroir also changes?
If we were to be magically transported 100 years into the future to find that over that all of Chablis got together shortly after we were transported and decided to start a new tradition of using 100% new oak on all their wines, would we still recognise it as Chablis? Would it’s terroir be intrinsically changed?
Or what about 60s and 70s Napa Cabs vs. current Cabs. Same region, but very different winemaking “traditions,” if you could call it that. Would someone that was in a coma for 60 years and woke up now recognise the current lineup of Napa Cabs as Napa Cab?
Are site-specific traditions part of that area’s terroir?
A few things caught my eye.
They don’t; they use barriques in Bordeaux. In Burgundy, they use pièces. If you go asking around, those three liters matter! 
(well, the shape, too).
In Italy, it was amphora.
What? Where?
In Italy, it was botti. Until the recent emergence of kvevri-styled amphorae in Friuli and Sicily, I don’t think they’ve touched amphorae since the Roman times.
And as for the Big Question in hand, I think human is part of the terroir, but that doesn’t include the winemaker. People can shape/have effect on the geography, the soil and whatnot and even things like planting density and canopy management. Those all directly affect the macro- and micro-terroir of a given plot. However, the effect ends when the grapes are harvested and the connection to the terroir’s effect is cut.
The winemaker’s job is to translate that expression of terroir into an end product, in which they can attempt to have as little influence as possible or mask it all away and everything in-between. But I myself don’t consider winemaking as part of terroir anymore - not even historic traditions of making wine in a certain way in certain places.
Thats the whole issue for me when it comes to showing “true terrior”. There are too many decisions made that influence the wine. No way you would recognise Chablis as you know it now with your example.
Even decisions made on how a vineyard is farmed, how vines are managed, pick date, yields and so on are human choices. Wine is a human invention.
If you let nature grow wild, and go eat the grapes as they fall to the ground. Thats terrior i guess.
(I know i am a bit extreme here…).
I like the low intervention term. I think it better describes what i really like about the more “natural wines”. Yes you take a million choices, but you try and respect the nature you farm by controlling it less, and you add as little as you think makes sense when you create your wine.
That’s really the question Marcus, Brady and I are debating.
What Marcus and I have suggested is that terroir in a wine is a clear sense of place. And to that end, the winemaking traditions of a place are intrinsically linked with how we perceive and identify a wine’s sense of place. Could one identify a wine as being from Chablis as Chablis if it was done in 100% new oak and picked very ripe? I’m not sure.
I think it’s more basic than that- a fried egg will taste just as surely of the cook as of the egg.
I think the issue most people run into is thinking of “the terroir” as a singular entity.
But it’s repetition of expression that leads to recognizable terroir. For a region like Chablis, we have repetition over time, as well as repetition among many vineyards and producers. It’s this layering, a “mille feuille”, that gives us each an idea of the terroir, making it recognizable only having sampled a region or vineyard many times.
The layering also produces a depth that allows a new sample to be it’s own unique wine but still within out perception of recognizable terroir.
But terroir is the expression of somewhereness. And the somewhere is always in a process of change. Again, climate is in Brady’s version of terroir. Look at 1997 in Burgundy. That vintage didn’t stretch us into modern temps but it did add a riper expression of terroir to Burgundy’s mille feuille(along with other vintages). As climate change alters growing seasons around the world, how the wines taste will be different. But the terroir is expressed within the warmer scale of wines from Burgundy. And even a vintage like 2018 doesn’t alter the landscape of terroir in Burgundy to unrecognizable levels. The few wines I have had from the vintage have little in common structurally with the 70s and 80s wines I first started drinking.
Regarding California, and the 1970s-80s wines. Climate change should also be factored in as well, and probably ahead of winemaking. An understanding of this could probably be gained by looking at wines from regions around Napa where the financial incentives aren’t as high. Looking at changes in Zinfandel abvs, as well as wines like Marietta’s Old Vine bottling will probably show us that while winemaking is a part of the transformation, climate and irrigation are the real impacts on Napa wines between then and now.
That said, we don’t put enough emphasis on latitude(IMO). The cycle of sunlight is, like all of this, very complex. But it is also for our short lifetimes, a relatively stable input to terroir. We often think of sun as how hot was it? But for plants, the changes in daylight hours through the growing season are it’s guide to upcoming weather. In June-July at the 45th parallel, the days are long and the plant knows it’s safe to focus on green growth. In September approaching the solstice, days have dropped to almost even hours with the night and plants are/have been reacting to that change. At the 42nd parallel, it will be a similar process, but not quite the same. Ditto the 40th and so on. Those differences are also contained in terroir and, IMO, mark obe of the most constant inputs to terroir. Far more so than soils which alter more significantly with a compost addition and an array of seasonal rains, compaction, alterations in soil biome, etc. (not that soils vary wildy) but they vary more than the distance and rate that we circle the sun at.
These stable markers help to make wines recognizable even as the cultural markers or climatic ones, vary from year to year.
Rick Allen’s comments on water should also get more attention. Oregon has very soft water, and Burgundy(I believe) is less so. That input may not be as stable as the solar season, but it also is a very significant impact on wines essential sense of place.
Last, consider Oregon. In 1964, there were no vinifera vines in the Willamette Valley. Then David Lett planted in 1965. In 1969 he made a young vine Willamette Valley Pinot Noir from two clones, Pommard and Wadensville. There was literally no “recognizable” terroir for that wine. It was the first. But it had terroir. And part of that terroir was David’s choice in clones, as well as site. As Oregon’s mille feuille increases, the recognizable expression comes more into view. And it ranges far wider than any single wine can encompass. To be honest though, it’s cultural aspect is more varied. Rather than the singular, very entrenched French culture of Burgundy, there are people from all over the world planting and growing in the Willamette Valley. That hodge podge is reflected in our terroir, as is David’s original clonal choices. Wadensville and Pommard still make up an enormously significant percentage of our vines, especially older plantings. And both clones perform very well in the Willamette Valley and will continue to play a part in the recognizable aspect of our wines.
Low intervention used to be the norm because prices were lower and there wasn’t an effective way to broadcast opinions. Gaining a reputation took a long time.
Enter the newsletter, tv, the glossy lifestyle magazine(Wine Spectator) and then the internet. Now awareness can reach millions overnights, and a significant review can create Screaming Eagle in a matter of years. Or the rich garagistes on the Right bank of Bordeaux. That muddied perceptions.
But wine is not just a human invention. We didn’t invent fermentation at all, it’s a natural process. One we can direct a bit but really don’t control. Even inhibiting it from happening takes an absurd amount of effort to actually do.
My commentary starts with “historically” and I think Roman times qualify as “historic”.
And you are spot on about the 3 liters and the shape! Getting it mixed up in WB isn’t nearly as bad as getting it mixed up in your cellar. Winding up with a couple of barriques in a cellar full of pieces is a story in itself…
But you are wrong about it being the winemaker’s hov to translate terroir into the wine. That is the yeast.
Indeed. However, back then, they were used for transportation of wine, not winemaking.
But you are wrong about it being the winemaker’s hov to translate terroir into the wine. That is the yeast. >
I certainly agree on that point in the sense that the yeast’s role is way bigger than many people realize.
However, yeast is only the tool with which the winemaker translates the terroir into wine. Just like with any tool, the winemaker can choose whether to inoculate or not, how to aid / suppress microbes in the wine and if choosing to inoculate, with what yeast. But still, that doesn’t change that translating the elusive language of terroir into understandable wine is the winemaker’s job as well.
John you are just thrilled that Sir William didn’t use any of your banned bingo words!
I need to hand the piece off to an associate to brief it for me, you know, dummy it down for us country squire folk.
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I give you that. Fermentation is a natural process and as such you are right. But i would still say wine as we know it is very much a human product. Fermentation is a process that we have come to understand and try to control in our favour to define a certain product.
And the wine we create is very much influenced by human choices before you even get to that process.
Very neat observation, Scott, and one that I can get onboard with. I respect Brady’s view stated above, but personally when I think of my personal definition of terroir—“a sense of place”—that sense of place includes the people and history…at least I fool myself into thinking it does. Gets me on a tangent—can I identify that a wine has terroir characteristics if I have never physically been to the place where it’s made? Maybe/probably not. Probably getting too metaphysical, but a sense of place is for me deeply intertwined with memory and memory of places doesn’t exist in a vacuum of people and history—this is only my mileage, mind you.
Having said that, my use of “place” is a “large-ish geographical area”. One of my fun personal examples is DRC. I’ve never been in their vineyards, tasted at their winery or met Aubert de Villaine. I’ve also tasted Burgundies that I like more. But almost all DRCs I have tasted have taken me instantly to the region of Burgundy which I have been fortunate enough to visit 3 times. The wine has transported me back in time and place and (perhaps an essential part of the enjoyment) to a time and place where I was happy and enjoying myself.
I adore Prager Gruner and Riesling. But I don’t apply the word “terroir” to those wines because I haven’t been there. Don’t know if this makes any sense—could be early-morning rambling and me being not-quite-awake yet ![[grin.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/5/53ba06e9b6e4b370ae7e3d7b3702ad1bda0a2d8e.gif "grin"){kind=small}