The Vintners Voice

   I began reading the work of Harold McGee, a food scientist, back when I was working as a line cook.  His book On Food and Cooking is, I believe, an absolute 'must own' book for anyone interested  in truly understanding cooking techniques.

   So it was with much enthusiasm that I read his article in the May 6th, 2007 New York Times ( co authored by Daniel Patterson ) titled " Talk Dirt To me" ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/style/tmagazine/06tdirt.html?pagewanted=1&n=Top/News/Science/Topics/Soil ).

   In the article McGee takes on one of the Community of Wine's hottest topics; Terrior.  He states early in the article that " The idea that one can taste the earth in wine is appealing...", " The trouble is that it is not true".  In typical McGee fashion he goes on to make a series of scientifically backed arguments that dispel the myth that wine is capable of tasting like the soil that the wine came from.

   He also says; " If you ask a hundred people about the meaning of terrior, they’ll give you a hundred definitions, ...".  I couldn't agree more with McGee here and I think this is the fundamental problem with any discussion of Terrior, you simply cannot be sure that any two people are talking about the same thing.  I have on this blog and elsewhere taken the stance that the word terrior should be stricken from our collective vocabulary and replaced with 'sense of place' or perhaps Matt Kramers' "somewhereness ".

    Terrior, has become a loaded word in today's wine lexicon.  It somehow denotes that only some wines are capable of showing 'terrior'.  That it is terrior that makes a wine great.  That wines dominated by earthy, mineral or soil notes show terrior and others that display more fruit do not.  Most of all I dislike the apparent criteria put forth by many wine writers that ' too much  oak, extraction or ripeness, covers up terrior'.  The problem is no one has yet to tell me  just how much oak or extraction is too much or how ripe is too ripe.  Hell most wine writers have a seriously outdate notion of what 'ripeness' is ( I have addressed this previously ).  In other words terrior is subjective.  If I were to take the advice of those with this limited view of what terrior is I would: pick my grapes as soon as they changed color ( around 17 brix ),  press them immediately so as not to extract anything from the skin, and ferment them only in stainless steel.  In other words the wines that best show terrior would be Rose's.

    'Sense of place' has no magic attributed to it.  It isn't something special that only certain vineyards from certain places are capable of obtaining.  I often assert that ALL wines display a sense of place unless a winemaker goes to great lengths to cover it up ( yes, many do ).  It isn't just wines dominated by earthy characters that show a 'sense of place', fruit flavor profiles can be specific to a place as well.  'Sense of place' also doesn't give the false impression that some parcels of land will simply make great wine no matter what; if La Tache were poorly farmed and the wine carelessly handled it too would be terrible.  'Sense of place' doesn't accept wines marked by microbial signatures as authentic reflections of place; reduction is reduction, Brett is Brett, they have no relation to place what so ever ( in fact they destroy place ).  'Sense of place' also gives as much credit to a vineyards geography; its elevation, slope, aspect, specific wind and rain patterns as it does to its soils.

    Most of all 'sense of place' doesn't require anyone to subscribe to a total bullshit world view.  McGee goes to great lengths to dispel the notion that vines take up flavor molecules from the soil and deposit it them in the wine.  He is right in doing so.  He dispels the myth that wines taste like the soil they are grown in.  He dismantles the foundation that terrior rests upon.

    What McGee does not do is strip wine completely of its influence by place.  He does not negate the importance of soil, aspect, climate etc in the final analysis of a wines 'character'.  Why does he not do so?  Why does he not kill, once and for all, the notion of terrior completely?  Simply because he cannot.  The truth is too strong.  Wines do reflect the places they come from, the earth does speak through them.  The problem is that terrior takes the arrogant position that we, as humans, can understand just what the earth is saying.  'Sense of place' give us the wiggle room needed to understand wine, it doesn't reduce the possibilities it expands them.  Most of all it allows us to be humble enough to say that though the earth is speaking, we don't understand everything it says.