690 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 5 SEPTEMBER 2021
So what is “terroir”, and what do people really mean when they use the
term “terroir-driven”? The American wine writer Matt Kramer, quoted
above, famously defined terroir as “somewhereness”. In his essay “The
Notion of Terroir”,3 he put it this way:
Although derived from soil or land (terre), terroir is not just an investigation
of soil and subsoil. It is everything that contributes to the distinction
of a vineyard plot. As such, it also embraces microclimate, precipitation,
air and water drainage, elevation, sunlight and temperature. But terroir
holds yet another dimension: it sanctions what cannot be measured, yet
still located and savoured. Terroir prospects for differences. It is at odds
with science, which demands proof by replication rather than in a shining
uniqueness.
Randall Grahm, in his 2007 essay “A Meditation on Terroir: the Return”,
put a more poetic twist on the subject:
The French make a salient distinction between vins d’effort and vins de terroir—
wines that are notably marked by the imprint of human efforts, as
opposed to wines whose character primarily reflects their place of origin.
Ultimately, vins d’effort are wines easy to like—presumably they are constructed
with precisely that in mind—but difficult to love, at least in the
thoroughly obsessive, “I’ve just seen a beautiful face and I will go mad if
I cannot see it again” kind of way. Vins d’effort, especially those of the
New World, attempt to hit the stylistic parameters of a “great” wine—concentration,
check; new wood, check; soft tannins, check. And yet the
result is like a picture of a composite, computer-generated “beautiful”
person: it is never as compelling as the picture of an aesthetically
“flawed” but unambiguously real person.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are wine writers who debunk the
importance of terroir and do not even recognize it as a legitimate concept.
Perhaps the most entertaining of these is the satirist Ron Washam, whose
pen name is “the HoseMaster of Wine”. This is how he explains it:
Terroir is a French word, used by wine connoisseurs, that has no meaning,
and is interchangeable with the words “I have no expletive idea
what I’m talking about.” For example, a wine lover might say, “This Chinon
certainly shows fabulous terroir.” Now that you have the insider
information, you know that he’s just remarked, “This Chinon certainly
shows I have no expletive idea what I’m talking about.” Many people will
imply that terroir is an expression that takes into consideration where the
wine was grown, what soil it was grown in, the microclimate, the regional
characteristics of the wine, the techniques used to produce the wine, and
even the influence of the winemaker—as though there could be one word
to express all that and have it make sense. Yeah, right. Well, there is one
word for all that, and that word is bullshit.4
On this topic, we fall into Mr. Kramer’s camp in the sense that we still
believe that great wine expresses its “somewhereness”. But rather than trying
to tease out the intangible elements of a wine’s character, we suggest