The tyranny of terroir

C

onsider the words of that famous son of Tuscany, the keen Chianti-sipping Galileo — “Wine is a compound of light and humour”. Like the French poet Baudelaire, he could not miss the captured sunlight that resides in a glass of wine. By humour, though, he was not suggesting that every wine is a bottle of hilarity (much as it might seem so as the night goes on). By humour (Italian umore) he meant moisture — more precisely, the characteristic climate and geological conditions of that region. What Montpellier’s Institut Superier de la Vigne et du Vindescribes as “the interaction of climate, grape variety and the soil”.

In a word, and that word couldn’t be anything but French — terroir.

“When you are about to drink wine… remember that you are drinking the earth’s blood.”

The concept of terroir has a distinguished heritage. Vitrivius, author of (among a great many other things) the most significant classical treatise on architecture, reflected on the influence of geological factors on characteristic flavours of regional wines. He couched these musings in terms of water as the earth’s life force pulsing through its veins. And Pliny the Elder, in his compendious Natural History, reported the words of Androcydes to Alexander the Great — “When you are about to drink wine… remember that you are drinking the earth’s blood.”

Modern debate over terroir has become largely a head-to-head between Old and New World styles and wine making philosophies. Lines of dispute have been drawn as Old World tradition versus New World technology. Or even Old World authenticity versus New World promiscuity.

Terroir advocates are frequently critical of the influence of critic Robert Parker, as well as oenologist Emile Peynaud’s efforts over the Twentieth Century to modernize Bordeaux wine making practices, continued today all over the world by his country-hopping protégé Michel Rolland. (This was a consistent theme asserted and developed through Jonathan Nossiter’s 2004 film Mondovino. The film is well worth a look, and not only for its treatment of terroir and Old versus New World tensions. But be warned. Its bum-numbing length can leave you feeling, as you stand up at the closing credits, that you’ve just sat through an entire Ingmar Bergman retrospective.)

Such criticism focuses primarily on the erosion of terroir and tradition, and the “Internationalizing” of wine styles. This has, it’s said, led to a monolithic vinous monotony (but stylistic monopoly), in which weight and size (of flavour, scale, alcohol and wood) steamroll regional diversity, subtlety and any element of appealing quirkiness.

If the Old World standards are all that wine should be judged by — is there any point at all to expanding variety and style in the New World?

This argument no question has merit. Still, tradition isn’t everything. History isn’t an excuse for stagnation. The Old World’s objection to the so-called International style is that it will supplant heterogeneity with uniformity. But, paradoxically, the Old World’s insistence that it possesses terroir and the New World most decidedly does not, is in itself a push towards uniformity and against diversity of style. If the Old World standards are all that wine should be judged by — is there any point at all to expanding variety and style in the New World?

Must every pinot taste like Burgundy (you will frequently see wine writers make comments on some New World pinot along the lines of “while a lovely drink, lacks true pinot varietal character…”)? Is cabernet that demonstrates greater opulence in its youth than most Bordeaux necessarily inferior? Is white Burgundy the only measure of chardonnay? And must all shiraz, and its adventures with grenache, be an imitation of Rhone reds?

The reputation of these regions and their wines is fully justified. But their prominence does tend to cast a pall over other wine styles and varieties and regions and techniques. They have become not only the standard by which other wines are judged, but the only context in which those judgements are made. These regions, in becoming identified with their traditional varieties, have in a very real and unyielding sense become the yardstick by which all others must be appraised. They have, in a word, become canonical.

The so-called Western Canon — that collection of the highest of high culture — is celebrated as the repository of accomplishment and heritage from ancient days to modern times. Equally, it’s castigated for marginalizing those works which, for whatever reasons, don’t quite “fit”.

The wine world has its canon, too — the traditions and inherited wisdom of the Old World that still inform much wine making today. Enduring European styles and standards continue to set the benchmarks of quality and acceptability (and dictate the basis by which other styles and standards “fit” or not). Which begs the question (or, in fact, the questions):

Can tradition and innovation be reconciled?

Can Old and New World wine characteristics coincide and cohabitate?

And (most importantly) — what’s going to give the best drinking?

It’s not just New World wine makers who find themselves on the outer. Wine makers in some of the oldest wine regions of Europe have also kicked against the constraints tradition imposes on them. The Sassicaia story is a salutary one…

Mario Incisa della Rochetta had an iconoclastic notion — to eschew the traditional sangiovese grape of Tuscany. The resulting wine was Sassicaia (“place of stones”), made from cabernet planted near the unfashionable Bolgheri marshes down from the Chianti hills. Officialdom was outraged, and further so by the “Super Tuscan” revolution that followed (we feel sure that old Tuscan son Galileo would have kept a more open mind, but then the Chianti of his time was made predominantly from the canaiolo grape over sangiovese — plus ça change…). These wines were given the lowliest classification possible, vino da tavola, that is bog-ordinaire table wine. But that didn’t stop them from gaining world wide fame, and the best of them outstripping in price the most expensive traditional Tuscan wines of Chianti Classico and Brunello di Montalcino.

None of this is to suggest that terroir doesn’t exist, that it’s all smoke and mirrors, or some wine-wanker shibboleth or secret hand shake. When it’s there, it’s unquestionably there. It’s just one of those things that are difficult to define but… well, you know it when you see it (or, in this case, taste it).

Tradition for tradition’s sake is no answer. Then again, nor is unbridled innovation severed from history. New World technological advances have without a doubt improved Old World wines. And Old World philosophies of wine continue to instruct those New World makers who seek, not necessarily to replicate Old World styles, but to replicate their distinct sense of individuality, authenticity and place.

Perhaps this rapprochement is already happening — the seemingly contradictory twin tyrannies of tradition and technology finally reconciling. You could see it as a kind of Hegelian dialectic, in which the thesis (tradition) and antithesis (technology) find their respectively most appealing aspects equally represented in synthesis — the best, so to speak, of both Worlds. As wine makers travel and work in other regions and countries, compare notes and swap observations, some Old World faults are refined and rectified, and the New World aspires to a better understanding of its own kinds of terroir. Wine, as all drinkers well have cause to know, promotes generosity and fosters sharing. Why shouldn’t that be the case at the level at which it’s made — the sharing of vision and philosophy towards better wines everywhere.

For the time being, however terroir is still frequently used to excuse poor-quality Old World wines. Like so —

“This wine is thin, insipid and uninspiring.”

“Eh bien, vous ne comprenez pas terroir”

[Loose translation — “Oh well, you do not understand terroir”, delivered with the sort of superior Gallic sniff that leaves you in no doubt that you are, in their eyes at least, an irredeemable peasant.]

And it’s still likewise used to damn any perceived lack of quality, individuality or je ne sais quoi in any New World wine. À la —

“This wine is fat, blowsy and overblown.”

“C’est merde.”

[Loose translation — “Yes, this wine is from the New World and therefore lacks the distinction bestowed by true terroir.”]

If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, then terroir may be the last refuge of the ignorant or the arrogant, or both.

If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, then terroir may be the last refuge of the ignorant or the arrogant, or both. In a symposium on the philosophy of wine run by the University of London, the prominent English philosopher Roger Scruton (who writes so eloquently about wine in other aspects) singles out Australian wines in particular as “a big problem”. In a deep genuflection to the French he dismisses not only this country’s wine making credentials and capacity, but even our historical right to make wines of the highest standard. Really? The fact is Australian wine growers do “cheap” a helluva lot better than the French, who’ll sell you paint-stripper for £5 a bottle, a price range that seems to be the benchmark for Scruton and other critics in their limited sampling of Australian wines. But we also do top end as well as anybody and far better than most. Glass of Hill of Grace or Grange anyone… or how about a Giaconda Chardonnay?

If you remain in doubt as to whether there’s true terroir outside of the Old World…

You only need to taste a venerable Hunter Semillon, showing the best an aged Grand Cru Chablis has and more (think the late 60s and early 70s Lindemans wines of Karl Stockhausen)…

You only need to taste a riesling that was lip-pursingly acerbic in its youth, and in maturity is packing on equal parts honey and kero (delish!)…

You only need to taste a Hunter shiraz which, after thirty years, brings together the body of a fine old Rhone with the singular elegance of exquisite Burgundy (Stockhausen again)…

and then you’ll see that there’s terroir in spades in Australian wine — with similar tales told for the rest of the New World.

This is an excerpt from the new book Drinking your own words - the psychology of wine published by Inmediasres Press.

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Sources

Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1996

Roger Scruton "The Philosophy of Wine", in Barry C Smith (Ed)  Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine, Signal Books, Oxford, 2007

Roger Scruton further cited in Jamie Goode, Philosophy and Wine: from Science to Subjectivity at www.wineanorak.com 

Mondovino, Diaphana Films, Writer/Director - Jonathan Nossiter

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