Wine's naturalistic fallacy

[Mike_Grammer]

Just published a free-to-read Tuesday morning provocation on The Wine Advocate site. Would be interested to hear everyone’s thought!

If your aim was to provoke, than I fear you have failed completely, because everyone here seems to agree with you completely, which is not surprising since your piece makes so much sense.

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.

The lexicon word is “plebify”

[Phil_T_r_o_t_t_e_r]

I feel like most of my posts on this thread are just quoting definitions from the Larousse or other etymology work rather than providing an insightful opinion like others. However, I think in this case, this discussion is greatly influenced by the etymology of the word “terroir”. Terroir in French is not strictly applied to wine. It is a word that has been used to describe geography, culture, and agriculture. I feel that “terroir” has crossed over in the English language strictly to apply to vineyards and wine. Please correct me if I am wrong.

As such, in French, you can find the definition of terroir that fits “all” bills… Sorry for the quotes in French and I hope that if you Google Translate it will do them justice

@M. Goodfellow:
Terroir:
1 - Région, province, pays considéré(ée) dans ses particularités rurales, ses traditions, sa culture, ses productions et du point de vue du caractère des personnes qui y vivent ou en sont originaires (e.g. Terroir breton)
2 - Sentir, fleurer le/son terroir. Avoir les caractéristiques d’une région, de la campagne.

@M. Daniels:
Terroir:
1 - Étendue de terre présentant une certaine homogénéité physique, originelle ou liée à des techniques culturales (drainage, irrigation, terrasses), apte à fournir certains produits agricoles. − En partic. Ces terres considérées du point de vue de la nature du sol qui communique un caractère particulier aux productions, notamment au vin
2 - Vin de terroir. Vin dont le goût particulier tient à la nature du sol.

So yes, a friendly disagreement where both parties are right. Maybe in English, the word terroir has less history and cannot span as many definitions (again, correct me if I am wrong).

But whatever definition of terroir you pick, it doesn’t change the fact that stating that “no” intervention (as there is no such thing) will make a wine taste true or truest to the terroir just kind of sounds hollow.

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

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.

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.

100% in agreement.

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

I feel like most of my posts on this thread are just quoting definitions from the Larousse or other etymology work rather than providing an insightful opinion like others. However, I think in this case, this discussion is greatly influenced by the etymology of the word “terroir”. Terroir in French is not strictly applied to wine. It is a word that has been used to describe geography, culture, and agriculture. I feel that “terroir” has crossed over in the English language strictly to apply to vineyards and wine. Please correct me if I am wrong.

As such, in French, you can find the definition of terroir that fits “all” bills… Sorry for the quotes in French and I hope that if you Google Translate it will do them justice

@M. Goodfellow:
Terroir:
1 - Région, province, pays considéré(ée) dans ses particularités rurales, ses traditions, sa culture, ses productions et du point de vue du caractère des personnes qui y vivent ou en sont originaires (e.g. Terroir breton)
2 - Sentir, fleurer le/son terroir. Avoir les caractéristiques d’une région, de la campagne.

@M. Daniels:
Terroir:
1 - Étendue de terre présentant une certaine homogénéité physique, originelle ou liée à des techniques culturales (drainage, irrigation, terrasses), apte à fournir certains produits agricoles. − En partic. Ces terres considérées du point de vue de la nature du sol qui communique un caractère particulier aux productions, notamment au vin
2 - Vin de terroir. Vin dont le goût particulier tient à la nature du sol.

So yes, a friendly disagreement where both parties are right. Maybe in English, the word terroir has less history and cannot span as many definitions (again, correct me if I am wrong).

But whatever definition of terroir you pick, it doesn’t change the fact that stating that “no” intervention (as there is no such thing) will make a wine taste true or truest to the terroir just kind of sounds hollow.

C’est bien

[ChrisJames]

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.

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.

100% in agreement.

Fermentation is a natural processes just as ageing meat is a natural process: they are both forms of decomposition. But ageing a ribeye rack in a temperature/humidity controlled room for 21 days will give you a different result than letting it age without intervention out on a pasture for 21 days. And I suspect most of us would prefer not to eat fermenting grapes off the vine in lieu of drinking artisan wines.

[Alan_Rath]

Winemaking signature has always struck me as similar to cooking great ingredients - do you like your freshly caught lobster steamed and served with lemon wedges or poached in butter? Both are still going to taste like lobster, but they are very different styles. Is one any more legitimate than the other? Nope.

I think it’s more basic than that- a fried egg will taste just as surely of the cook as of the egg.

I’ve seen the analogy made that winemaking is like seasoning in cooking: you can range from the simplest plain poached egg, to L’œuf Cocotte façon d’Alba à la Truffe, to Huevos Rancheros smothered in beans and spicy salsa. Many of these are delicious (is ketchup on scrambled eggs the Yellowtail of cuisine?), but if the eggs become a mere component of the dish, instead of the prominent ingredient, where do they cease being “eggs”, and become something else?

[William_Kelley]

Winemaking signature has always struck me as similar to cooking great ingredients - do you like your freshly caught lobster steamed and served with lemon wedges or poached in butter? Both are still going to taste like lobster, but they are very different styles. Is one any more legitimate than the other? Nope.

I think it’s more basic than that- a fried egg will taste just as surely of the cook as of the egg.

I’ve seen the analogy made that winemaking is like seasoning in cooking: you can range from the simplest plain poached egg, to L’œuf Cocotte façon d’Alba à la Truffe, to Huevos Rancheros smothered in beans and spicy salsa. Many of these are delicious (is ketchup on scrambled eggs the Yellowtail of cuisine?), but if the eggs become a mere component of the dish, instead of the prominent ingredient, where do they cease being “eggs”, and become something else?

I guess I’d take this analogy the other way, and suggest that saying a wine is “transparent” or entirely devoid of “makeup” is equivalent to saying that a beef Bourgignon is “raw” on the grounds that it hasn’t been seasoned.

[William_Kelley]

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.

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.

Right, when we say we are “making wine” I guess we mean we are manipulating the parameters of a microbial ecology… though then, of course, there is élevage.

[David_Bu3ker]

We are enabling controlled spoilage.

[Alan_Rath]

I think it’s more basic than that- a fried egg will taste just as surely of the cook as of the egg.

I’ve seen the analogy made that winemaking is like seasoning in cooking: you can range from the simplest plain poached egg, to L’œuf Cocotte façon d’Alba à la Truffe, to Huevos Rancheros smothered in beans and spicy salsa. Many of these are delicious (is ketchup on scrambled eggs the Yellowtail of cuisine?), but if the eggs become a mere component of the dish, instead of the prominent ingredient, where do they cease being “eggs”, and become something else?

I guess I’d take this analogy the other way, and suggest that saying a wine is “transparent” or entirely devoid of “makeup” is equivalent to saying that a beef Bourgignon is “raw” on the grounds that it hasn’t been seasoned.

I should follow up by saying that a simple poached egg, with nothing more than a dash of salt can be utterly delicious and satisfying, and a beautiful representation of “egg”. Or one could equally enjoy Eggs Benedict, with a well balanced dose of ham and hollandaise. There is room for the entire spectrum, which is what I took your piece to say. To take the analogy to its logical conclusion: I draw the line at obliterating a beautiful piece of fish by “blackening” it with a mass of burned spice that overwhelms any sense of “fish”, except perhaps the texture. 200% new oak, 100% green stems, or 30 brix is the blackened fish of wine. The question for each person is where is that line?

[William_Kelley]

But terroir is the expression of somewhereness.

Now this is a really interesting point, if looked at in its historical dimensions. Of course, there is a long and fascinating history of people distinguishing between sites on the basis of the characteristic textures and flavors they have tended to impart on the wines produced from their grapes. But this definition of terroir as the taste of somewhereness, as far as I can tell, is actually quite recent (I think Matt Kramer’s book was in fact very influential in this regard). At some point around 30 years ago, “gout de terroir” went from being translated as “tastes of dirt” to “tastes of the dirt”. This is a very intriguing discursive shift…

Just a few historical examples:

“Earthy Taste, Gout de terroir—By the term earthy a single definite taste must not be understood, but divers flavors which are all in general disgusting or bad” (1892)

“an earthy flavor, known in wines as gout de terroir” (1890)

“some wines are affected by the gout de terroir (earthy taste)” (1880)

“this latter grape, though magnificent to the eye, had, to my taste, a flavor different to the ordinary nice kind, something like what the French call the gout de terroir in wine” (1853)

“gout de terroir—taste of the soil” (1976)

“GOUT DE TERROIR : having a taste of the earth or soil ; strongly earthy ; quite pleasant in modest amounts but sometimes overwhelming” (1977)

“The red wines of […] are often marked by a gout de terroir […] with a marked earthy quality.” (1992)

Compare this with:

“the resultant wine will have a distinctive taste and character imparted by the local soil , called gout de terroir in France” (1992)

“the gout de terroir , or taste of place” (1999)

“The French term gout de terroir refers to the characteristic expression of a specific vineyard in a wine” (2003)

Coincidentally with “terroir” being imbued with additional meaning—let’s say, being the point around which a lot of existing thinking crystalized, especially for non-French wine lovers—the use of the word exploded in Anglophone writing, as you can see from this google NGram.

“terroir” in Anglophone published texts by WilliamGFKelley, on Flickr

[m_ristev]

“GOUT DE TERROIR : having a taste of the earth or soil ; strongly earthy ; quite pleasant in modest amounts but sometimes overwhelming” (1977)

this sounds suspiciously like brett

i can’t recall having ever tasted too much terroir in my glass

[William_Kelley]

“GOUT DE TERROIR : having a taste of the earth or soil ; strongly earthy ; quite pleasant in modest amounts but sometimes overwhelming” (1977)

this sounds suspiciously like brett

i can’t recall having ever tasted too much terroir in my glass

Well, yes! It was considered a flaw and as you say, likely a proxy for brettanomyces.

[GregT]

Haven’t heard ramify used in a long time.

Decent article. Obviously, wine is made somehow. What you want to call it or do with it will be where the arguments lie.

Thanks Markus. I can’t believe I remembered this from forty years ago! It was a rejoinder to Robert Frost’s ‘Nothing Gold can Stay’

Seed Leaves
Homage to R. F.

Here something stubborn comes,
Dislodging the earth crumbs
And making crusty rubble.
it comes up bending double,
And looks like a green staple.
It could be seedling maple,
Or artichoke, or bean.
That remains to be seen.


Forced to make choice of ends,
The stalk in time unbends,
Shakes off the seed-case, heaves
Aloft, and spreads two leaves
Which still display no sure
And special signature.
Toothless and fat, they keep
The oval form of sleep.


This plant would like to grow
And yet be embryo;
In crease, and yet escape
The doom of taking shape;
Be vaguely vast, and climb
To the tip end of time
With all of space to fill,
Like boundless Igdrasil
That has the stars for fruit.


But something at the root
More urgent that the urge
Bids two true leaves emerge;
And now the plant, resigned
To being self-defined
Before it can commerce
With the great universe,
Takes aim at all the sky
And starts to ramify.

BTW William, nice prose. It’s been discussed.

As to terroir, that’s, as pointed out, a recent positive. It was always considered a negative in the past. Partly in response to the development of the US wine industry and the introduction of wines as good as those in France, the French started claiming that their wine was better, or at least special, because of the terroir. But that gets nowhere because anything you do to modify the effects of terroir defeat the argument. If you pull leaves, orient rows, prune canes, you’re manipulating the effect of the terroir.

And prior to that, once you graft a vine from one continent onto a vine from another, it all goes out the window. Wouldn’t the true effect of terroir have phylloxera kill the vines? Yes, phylloxera is from somewhere else, but so are the grapes. Garnacha didn’t originate in France after all.

[David_Bu3ker]

But terroir is the expression of somewhereness.

Now this is a really interesting point, if looked at in its historical dimensions. Of course, there is a long and fascinating history of people distinguishing between sites on the basis of the characteristic textures and flavors they have tended to impart on the wines produced from their grapes. But this definition of terroir as the taste of somewhereness, as far as I can tell, is actually quite recent (I think Matt Kramer’s book was in fact very influential in this regard). At some point around 30 years ago, “gout de terroir” went from being translated as “tastes of dirt” to “tastes of the dirt”. This is a very intriguing discursive shift…

Just a few historical examples:

“Earthy Taste, Gout de terroir—By the term earthy a single definite taste must not be understood, but divers flavors which are all in general disgusting or bad” (1892)

“an earthy flavor, known in wines as gout de terroir” (1890)

“some wines are affected by the gout de terroir (earthy taste)” (1880)

“this latter grape, though magnificent to the eye, had, to my taste, a flavor different to the ordinary nice kind, something like what the French call the gout de terroir in wine” (1853)

“gout de terroir—taste of the soil” (1976)

“GOUT DE TERROIR : having a taste of the earth or soil ; strongly earthy ; quite pleasant in modest amounts but sometimes overwhelming” (1977)

“The red wines of […] are often marked by a gout de terroir […] with a marked earthy quality.” (1992)

Compare this with:

“the resultant wine will have a distinctive taste and character imparted by the local soil , called gout de terroir in France” (1992)

“the gout de terroir , or taste of place” (1999)

“The French term gout de terroir refers to the characteristic expression of a specific vineyard in a wine” (2003)

Coincidentally with “terroir” being imbued with additional meaning—let’s say, being the point around which a lot of existing thinking crystalized, especially for non-French wine lovers—the use of the word exploded in Anglophone writing, as you can see from this google NGram.

“terroir” in Anglophone published texts by WilliamGFKelley, on Flickr

So the word terroir went from being something that seemed to have been fairly consistently understood, to something that had different meanings for each person who used it. Chaos!

[Jayson_Cohen]

I’ve seen the analogy made that winemaking is like seasoning in cooking: you can range from the simplest plain poached egg, to L’œuf Cocotte façon d’Alba à la Truffe, to Huevos Rancheros smothered in beans and spicy salsa. Many of these are delicious (is ketchup on scrambled eggs the Yellowtail of cuisine?), but if the eggs become a mere component of the dish, instead of the prominent ingredient, where do they cease being “eggs”, and become something else?

I guess I’d take this analogy the other way, and suggest that saying a wine is “transparent” or entirely devoid of “makeup” is equivalent to saying that a beef Bourgignon is “raw” on the grounds that it hasn’t been seasoned.

I should follow up by saying that a simple poached egg, with nothing more than a dash of salt can be utterly delicious and satisfying, and a beautiful representation of “egg”. Or one could equally enjoy Eggs Benedict, with a well balanced dose of ham and hollandaise. There is room for the entire spectrum, which is what I took your piece to say. To take the analogy to its logical conclusion: I draw the line at obliterating a beautiful piece of fish by “blackening” it with a mass of burned spice that overwhelms any sense of “fish”, except perhaps the texture. 200% new oak, 100% green stems, or 30 brix is the blackened fish of wine. The question for each person is where is that line?

A quibble in the details. You wouldn’t want lignified stems. Only green ones. And 100% whole cluster (100% green stems, no?) can work without obliterating the character of the grape juice.

[LasseK1]

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.

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.

Right, when we say we are “making wine” I guess we mean we are manipulating the parameters of a microbial ecology… though then, of course, there is élevage.

No thats not what we mean.
I was answering the notion that wine is not a human invention just because we use a natural process to create it. I think elevage is very important and an overlooked part of winemaking with all the focus on “making the wine in the vineyard”. Elevage as i understand it, enhances the idea i have of wine being a very designed product often influenced by local culture, local history, current trends and technology. I don’t give much for the notions of natural or terrior driven wine.

[Bruce_G1]

Now this is a really interesting point, if looked at in its historical dimensions. Of course, there is a long and fascinating history of people distinguishing between sites on the basis of the characteristic textures and flavors they have tended to impart on the wines produced from their grapes. But this definition of terroir as the taste of somewhereness, as far as I can tell, is actually quite recent (I think Matt Kramer’s book was in fact very influential in this regard). At some point around 30 years ago, “gout de terroir” went from being translated as “tastes of dirt” to “tastes of the dirt”. This is a very intriguing discursive shift…

Just a few historical examples:

“Earthy Taste, Gout de terroir—By the term earthy a single definite taste must not be understood, but divers flavors which are all in general disgusting or bad” (1892)

“an earthy flavor, known in wines as gout de terroir” (1890)

“some wines are affected by the gout de terroir (earthy taste)” (1880)

“this latter grape, though magnificent to the eye, had, to my taste, a flavor different to the ordinary nice kind, something like what the French call the gout de terroir in wine” (1853)

“gout de terroir—taste of the soil” (1976)

“GOUT DE TERROIR : having a taste of the earth or soil ; strongly earthy ; quite pleasant in modest amounts but sometimes overwhelming” (1977)

“The red wines of […] are often marked by a gout de terroir […] with a marked earthy quality.” (1992)

Compare this with:

“the resultant wine will have a distinctive taste and character imparted by the local soil , called gout de terroir in France” (1992)

“the gout de terroir , or taste of place” (1999)

“The French term gout de terroir refers to the characteristic expression of a specific vineyard in a wine” (2003)

Coincidentally with “terroir” being imbued with additional meaning—let’s say, being the point around which a lot of existing thinking crystalized, especially for non-French wine lovers—the use of the word exploded in Anglophone writing, as you can see from this google NGram.

“terroir” in Anglophone published texts by WilliamGFKelley, on Flickr

Seems like you’ve proved that the mis-appropriation of the phrase “gout de terroir” is a recent phenomenon, not that the assignation of a unique set of sensory attributes to the agricultural produce of a certain piece of land is a new phenomenon.
I imagine that people have been trying to produce something “worthy of the land”–something that accentuates the positive attributes of a parcel of land and avoids incorporating any discernible amount of the negatives–for as long as man has practiced agronomy. Presumably, communicating the uniqueness of the site and explaining the importance of production protocols tailored to preserving that uniqueness came soon after.

[Bruce_G1]

We are enabling controlled spoilage.

Winemaking is essentially entropy management.

[Peter_Chiu]

This tendency is exactly that: a tendency. It is reaching the end of the pendulum swing as you let us understand through the first paragraph of your article:

how tenable is any philosophy for wine production that seeks to minimize the importance of production itself?

This was a necessary movement to get the consumer mass out of the

bland, commercial conformity on a beverage

and it will leave a more knowledgeable and informed generation of vignerons to pass these experiences and changes on to the next. This will also have served a purpose to educate the consumers to other styles of wines that were not following the “commercial conformity”.

So all in all, it was a good thing, it is a good thing but as almost everything else in life… let’s stay away from the extremes.

Good article and proper timing too as we feel that this shift to the extreme is reaching its end.

Phil : thanks for providing the French translation in this thread and it is good to live in Montreal, Quebec. I often told my friends who visited me that Montreal is half Paris and half New York.

I also enjoy your comments -specially this line *So all in all, it was a good thing, it is a good thing but as almost everything else in life… let’s stay away from the extremes.

In China…we say…sometimes …it is preferable to : to take the middle road.

BTW…I opened a bottle of Des Croix A-Corton Les Boutieres 2018 this evening. I took the bottle out from the cellar and waited for 4 hours - at room temperate before pop and pour. It behaved very similar to the last few vintage - which meant that it does not tasted like from sun-kissed grapes form vintage year 2018.There is no over-ripeness and heaviness like the Volnay Village 2018 by Domaine T. Glantenay which I opened 2 weeks ago. It was delicious and… if blind…I would not guess it is Aloxe-Corton but rather a Chambolle. That being said, this bottle did not belong to the same class as vintage 2015 ( more concentration ). I think the wine need to put on weight and hope it will be so with a couple years of bottle age.