Terry Theise and yeasts

[Jonathan Loesberg]

originally posted by Thor:
One of the other reasons I personally prefer a more outlined and bordered-within-the-vineyard definition of terroir is that if it exists in the way I'm suggesting, it would be -- subjected to the right and sufficient science -- objective. That is, if there's a measurable and repeatable site effect on a vineyard, it would submit to and be revealed by chemical analysis (I don't know if it could now or not, but I presume it could at some point), and we could point to it as The Terroir of Site X. And then we could have all the more difficult but more fun arguments about subjectivity of taste, and the skill level of tasters, and whether or not any of it matters, in a more bounded context of its own.

I will assert with no evidence that anything that can be made objective about wine will immediately become uninteresting. That would certainly include a carefully controlled definition of terroir that yielded measurable numbers registering vineyard effect on taste (assuming the effect on taste could be measured given the already known biological variation in the sense of taste).

 

[Thor]

I don't know. People sure seem interested in alcohol levels, and the numbers are objective even if the reactions aren't. Acidity, too. And (to bring this back to the subject of the thread, not that that's ever mattered here) known and predictable structural/flavor outcomes from inoculant yeasts, which is one of the points of using them (or not) in the first place.

I think a rigid scientific definition of terroir would be most interesting from a geographical standpoint, because then there'd be a way to settle arguments about site boundaries. From a taste perspective? Maybe not. Since taste, as you say, is biologically variant, coming up with the chemical code for Rosacker isn't the same as being able to identify the Rosacker terroir. But the chemistry would certainly be of interest to winemakers, whether they chose to make use of it or not.

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:

I think subjectivity is a snare here. In an obvious sense, it is redundant to call a judgment subjective since we make them within our mind. I expect you mean that the judgment, though, doesn't have any objective criteria to which it makes reference. I don't think this is correct. Taste is subjective in this sense. I like what I like because I like it and there's not much else to say. If those who want to judge by terroir are right, it is actually out there. And I'd have to have a form of metaphysical certainty for which I think I have no warrant to say that I know it isn't out there. Of course, you may mean that, with regard to terroir, we are regularly mistaken and don't have sufficient common ground in our ability to communicate taste to make reasonably warranted judgments and we should properly acknowledge that. I would certainly agree with that. But none of that proves that there's not something real out there that we are doing our level best to refer to. And that is even true with an intolerably floating definition of terroir. Our inability to understand something precisely and to fall back on vague definitions that we think capture the phenomenon we are discussing does not disprove its existence. Accepting uncertainty is the responsibility of discourse within most fields. That's not the same as not thinking one is saying anything.

As to fatboy's response, I would claim that this response is well within Wittgenstein's sense that ordinary language is all right. But perhaps he meant early Wittgenstein.

i meant late.

and i think (maybe) you read too much positivity into wittgenstein's comments on definitions. that the secondary literature on this stuff is sparse and generally woeful doesn't help, but the later wittgenstein is -- for good reason -- utterly negative about definitions (partly the confusion is his fault: he seems to have given up on the idea of definitions to the extent that the "investigations" is best seen as an effort to lead you through the thought processes he would have used to generate the text for an 'ordinary' philosophical work, rather than actually write that text, and this increases the risk that things get taken out of context interpreted backwards.)

still:

69. How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine that we should describe games to him, and we might add: This and similar things are called games. And do we know any more about it ourselves? Is it only other people that we cannot tell exactly what a game is? - But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundary - for a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable? Not at all! (Except for that special purpose.) No more than it took the definition 1 pace = 75cm to make the measure of one pace usable. And if you want to say But still, before that it wasnt an exact measure, then I reply: very well, it was an inexact one. - Though you still owe me a definition of exactness.

so you saying that "this wine shows better expression of terroir than that wine" is entirely sensible, and entirely consistent with the sensibility of later wittgenstein. we might even have a conversation in the context of those wines, and i might even come to understand exactly why you thought thought that (in the end, we might even agree on a definition for that purpose) -- but trying to define "terroir" in a vacuum is like getting all worked up about an engine that is just idling.

which is why jim is right (and is why i suspect we aren't as far apart as it might appear).

fb.

 

[Thor]

(replying to a message that's no longer there; I can erase this one if it helps thread continuity)

I don't care whether or not a novice and the Trimbachs taste the same thing from Rosacker. I mean, I "care" in the sense that I occasionally find it interesting to think about, but research has already shown that even if they do taste the same thing they probably won't/can't describe it the same way (I know science is late getting to that conclusion vs. other fields), so whether they do or don't doesn't matter on multiple levels.

In any case, it's Oswaldo who thinks that the only facet of terroir that matters about which he (Oswaldo wrote "we," but that's obviously wrong) cares is the tasting thereof. I'm the one who thinks that taste is absolutely not the part that matters if we're really interested in a concept of terroir that has any utility, and the example you're using is one of the reasons I think that.

 

[Unknown]

the eyes and ears of the politburo are everywhere.

fb. (the good citizen.)

 

[Thor]

(replying to whichever version of a now-edited post I saw when I started the reply)

I think terroir operates on the plants in that terroir. I think farmers care, or at least should care, about it more than tasters, because they're the only ones it affects in any crucial way. I'm not saying tasters shouldn't care about it -- I do, for example -- but I don't think whether or not I can correctly identify the five Rosackers in a lineup of ten rieslings has anything to do with the existence or codification of Rosacker's terroir.

All I was saying up above is that, under my definition of terroir, the only actual way to identify it is by studying the chemistry of the plant (or, in this case, the fruit from the plant). Since that's not the definition that Oswaldo is using and of which Jonathan approved, that identification doesn't have much meaning to them. Similarly, since Oswaldo's definition relies on taster identification and all with which it is fraught, I don't think it's useful.

 

[Oswaldo Costa]

originally posted by Thor:
In any case, it's Oswaldo who thinks that the only facet of terroir that matters is the tasting thereof.

I never said that, nor think that.

 

[Thor]

In any case, it's Oswaldo who thinks that the only facet of terroir that matters is the tasting thereof.

I never said that, nor think that.

You're right, I was imprecise. You said this:

But as consumers, we ultimately care about terroir only insofar as it manifests itself in the wine, not in the plant or fruit.

Assuming that you now know, even if just from this thread, that the generalization is false (and thus I'm going to mentally replace "we" with "Oswaldo"), you did say that it's what you "care" about, and that what I think shows terroir is not.

 

[David M. Bueker]

I know we have drifted away from Terry Theise a bit, but I received the following from him today & he said I could quote him, so:

"Every single one of the more than 50 growers with whom I work not including Champagne growers agrees that yeast is a minor point. This number includes many who ferment ambient and others who ferment cultured, as well as growers (like Selbach) who do both."

Note that Terry also echoed David Schildknecht's comments that Donnhoff does not do spontaneous fermentation, but rather uses cultured yeasts isolated from his various sites. I should add that Terry said (as did David) that he hasn't checked into this issue in a while, so things may have changed, though he doubts it.

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by Fatboy:

originally posted by .sasha:
98 norheimer kirschheck spaetlese totally singing last week

but i didn't buy yours, so who knows

ditto 93 brucke spaet.

fwiw, i'd keep the 98s longer, and lay waste to the 99s, if you have any. they have lost their persistent lumpen youthfulness (as doubtless the monkey will too, one day).

and for those who follow these things, the 96 o-l kab is much less weird than it was. much less. now that i've nearly finished mine.

fb.

I've been trying to lay waste to 99 NHH, but it keeps on getting better. But I am a sucker for red fruits in those wines.

I've never *seen* a bottle of 96 o-l, let alone tasted one. But a guy you know once opened an incredible 97.

 

[SFJoe]

A guy you know has some '98 o-l kab. Should break out a bottle.

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by .sasha:

I've never *seen* a bottle of 96 o-l, let alone tasted one.

uuhh. if only i'd known. i've been feeding it to the female wing of the popular front for years. it's very popular with the lady comrades. (as is the 96 haart goldtropfchen kab, but that's a whole nother story.)

fb

 

[Oswaldo Costa]

originally posted by Thor:

In any case, it's Oswaldo who thinks that the only facet of terroir that matters is the tasting thereof.

I never said that, nor think that.

You're right, I was imprecise. You said this:

But as consumers, we ultimately care about terroir only insofar as it manifests itself in the wine, not in the plant or fruit.

Assuming that you now know, even if just from this thread, that the generalization is false (and thus I'm going to mentally replace "we" with "Oswaldo"), you did say that it's what you "care" about, and that what I think shows terroir is not.

Obviously I should have written

But as consumers of wine, we ultimately care about terroir only insofar as it manifests itself in the wine, not in the plant or fruit.

But I agree that much of this conversation is useful, certainly to me, even if our beloved Marlboro Man and Kung-Fu Panda dont agree.

I can see the appeal of leaving out transients. I dont agree that it would make the definition more scientific, assuming that's desirable, just neater, by highlighting the more structural, or less changeable, aspects, but at the cost of impoverishing the range of impacting variables. I see weather as an integral aspect of climate, no less integral because irregular and unpredictable. The climate of some places (e.g., Andean deserts) is marked by highly recurrent weather, and churn out more or less the same wine year after year. Burgundy doesnt, and its maddening transience, and how winemakers there manage it, is part of the variability that fascinates us. Ditto for pests and yeasts. I see microbial life as an integral part of terroir because it (or its absence, or partial presence, etc.) impacts vines and fruit (to stick to your terminus). I see these things as part of terroir because they are part of nature, not the winemaker, and they are site-specific.

As for the footnote issue of the farmer having to choose between conflicting expressions of terroir, I am not advocating any purist stances, and part of the usefulness of the continuum definition v. cut & dry is that it puts all decisions in a "towards more reflective" or "towards less reflective" direction. Anything a winemaker chooses to do instead of letting nature choose is, ipso facto, an interference with nature and terroir as I define it, and many of these interferences are necessary and welcome. A farmer could, if he wanted to, allow nature to express itself through mildew and pests, killing the vines and preventing any expression of terroir altogether, or choose to do some intervention, reducing a little bit what the nature of the place hath wrought in order to save most of it on a macro scale. He often has to choose between incompatible expressions of terroir, like health and disease, just as we do in our own bodies.

Ultimately, I look for wine to be both delicious and something I "approve" in terms of process. Which is why, unlike Eric, I would say that I do, in fact, drink ideology, as well as flavors and textures. So I dont, as you say, only care about how terroir manifests itself in how the wine tastes. I also care about what I see as its ethical dimension, the intention to allow the nature of a specific place to express itself as fully as possible, even if we cant taste it. I want the sensory pleasure and the ethical satisfaction, even if the second is pyrrhic without the first. I find intriguing the notion (that you put forth) that natural winemaking can actually obscure terroir, though I cant help but wonder how useful any notion of terroir can be if giving freer expression to nature obscures rather than enhances its presence (if you are talking only about the homogenizing effect of CM, then I withdraw this last comment).

Yeasts are considered crucial to every single one of the natural winemakers I visited in the Loire recently. They all considered their yeasts part of their terroirs simply because they are part of the expression of place. They apparently are not considered crucial by the majority of German winemakers and their importers. So, we have a situation where those who use ambient/spontaneous yeasts think theyre crucial and those who dont use them think theyre not. Interesting. Well, I cast my humble lot with those who do, but mostly for what I see as ethical reasons, because too much is still unknown about the long term effects of yeasts. Maybe thats a bit Taliban, but it enhances my wine journey to feel engaged in that way, and I choose on esthetic grounds because I dont recognize the possibility that you seek, of choosing on scientific grounds.

 

[Hank Beckmeyer]

One can argue wether yeast is native to a vineyard or a winery. I think that's a good and interesting thing to discuss and explore. But most important for me, in choosing spontaneous (or ambient, my preferred term) fermentation is that it allows a "vintage effect" to influence the wine. For me, reflection of the growing season is a very important, and I want it in my wines. Every year brings a different set and combinations of yeasts into play.

Using a packaged yeast, or even a cultured yeast from my locale, would obscure that influence.

-Hank
(trying to be brief so Thor has more room)

 

[SFJoe]

originally posted by Hank Beckmeyer:
One can argue wether yeast is native to a vineyard or a winery. I think that's a good and interesting thing to discuss and explore. But most important for me, in choosing spontaneous (or ambient, my preferred term) fermentation is that it allows a "vintage effect" to influence the wine. For me, reflection of the growing season is a very important, and I want it in my wines. Every year brings a different set and combinations of yeasts into play.

Using a packaged yeast, or even a cultured yeast from my locale, would obscure that influence.

-Hank
(trying to be brief so Thor has more room)

I have heard the same thing from other growers. Marc Ollivier, for instance, feels that different yeast populations give different vintage expressions.

Makes plenty of sense that warm, sunny years could have different populations than cold, wet ones, in a primitive analysis.

 

[Jonathan Loesberg]

originally posted by Fatboy:

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:

I think subjectivity is a snare here. In an obvious sense, it is redundant to call a judgment subjective since we make them within our mind. I expect you mean that the judgment, though, doesn't have any objective criteria to which it makes reference. I don't think this is correct. Taste is subjective in this sense. I like what I like because I like it and there's not much else to say. If those who want to judge by terroir are right, it is actually out there. And I'd have to have a form of metaphysical certainty for which I think I have no warrant to say that I know it isn't out there. Of course, you may mean that, with regard to terroir, we are regularly mistaken and don't have sufficient common ground in our ability to communicate taste to make reasonably warranted judgments and we should properly acknowledge that. I would certainly agree with that. But none of that proves that there's not something real out there that we are doing our level best to refer to. And that is even true with an intolerably floating definition of terroir. Our inability to understand something precisely and to fall back on vague definitions that we think capture the phenomenon we are discussing does not disprove its existence. Accepting uncertainty is the responsibility of discourse within most fields. That's not the same as not thinking one is saying anything.

As to fatboy's response, I would claim that this response is well within Wittgenstein's sense that ordinary language is all right. But perhaps he meant early Wittgenstein.

i meant late.

and i think (maybe) you read too much positivity into wittgenstein's comments on definitions. that the secondary literature on this stuff is sparse and generally woeful doesn't help, but the later wittgenstein is -- for good reason -- utterly negative about definitions (partly the confusion is his fault: he seems to have given up on the idea of definitions to the extent that the "investigations" is best seen as an effort to lead you through the thought processes he would have used to generate the text for an 'ordinary' philosophical work, rather than actually write that text, and this increases the risk that things get taken out of context interpreted backwards.)

still:

69. How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine that we should describe games to him, and we might add: This and similar things are called games. And do we know any more about it ourselves? Is it only other people that we cannot tell exactly what a game is? - But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundary - for a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable? Not at all! (Except for that special purpose.) No more than it took the definition 1 pace = 75cm to make the measure of one pace usable. And if you want to say But still, before that it wasnt an exact measure, then I reply: very well, it was an inexact one. - Though you still owe me a definition of exactness.

so you saying that "this wine shows better expression of terroir than that wine" is entirely sensible, and entirely consistent with the sensibility of later wittgenstein. we might even have a conversation in the context of those wines, and i might even come to understand exactly why you thought thought that (in the end, we might even agree on a definition for that purpose) -- but trying to define "terroir" in a vacuum is like getting all worked up about an engine that is just idling.

which is why jim is right (and is why i suspect we aren't as far apart as it might appear).

fb.

If you think secondary literature on Wittgenstein is sparse, you don't get out much.

In any case the passage you quote is arguing, I would say, exactly what I was, that precise definitions don't exist, but pointing like activities do and work perfectly well for our uses. I take Oswaldo's original description to be a pointing like description as opposed to Thor's desire for a scientific definition.

Other than Jim's use of the term subjectivity, which has no meaning in Wittgenstein, in any case, I was agreeing with his argument that one won't get precision in such discussions but saying that conversation wasn't therefore useless, again, I take it, a Wittgensteinian acceptance of ordinary language being all right.

Having said all that, though I find Wittgenstein almost as fascinating as Kant and Hegel, I doubt the rest of the board will follow us there. So I'll just say that I think we can talk about terroir meaningfully as long as we don't want scientific descriptions of terroir and don't get hung up on definitions of meaning.

 

[Florida Jim]

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
So I'll just say that I think we can talk about terroir meaningfully as long as we don't want scientific descriptions of terroir and don't get hung up on definitions of meaning.

There you go.
Best, Jim

 

[Unknown]

originally posted by SFJoe:

originally posted by Hank Beckmeyer:
One can argue wether yeast is native to a vineyard or a winery. I think that's a good and interesting thing to discuss and explore. But most important for me, in choosing spontaneous (or ambient, my preferred term) fermentation is that it allows a "vintage effect" to influence the wine. For me, reflection of the growing season is a very important, and I want it in my wines. Every year brings a different set and combinations of yeasts into play.

Using a packaged yeast, or even a cultured yeast from my locale, would obscure that influence.

-Hank
(trying to be brief so Thor has more room)

I have heard the same thing from other growers. Marc Ollivier, for instance, feels that different yeast populations give different vintage expressions.

Makes plenty of sense that warm, sunny years could have different populations than cold, wet ones, in a primitive analysis.

The whole weather and yeast thing is huge for me. Not a fan of big tastings in general, but some of the more memorable "verticals" of bottlings from great sites have clearly displayed a common factor (undoubtedly due to terroir to a large extent) along with a thrilling variation due to vintage conditions.

To the extent that weather dictates an important expression of terroir, we could certainly argue (one way or the other) whether the yeast population constitutes a part of terroir. Certainly it is one of the vehicles for the expression of terroir in a given year (I will not say the only vehicle, as I've sat through great verticals of innoculated wines), and as such I tend to associate it with the characteristics of the site.

To SFJoe's point, I wonder if the population changes slightly every year, or if it takes an extreme situation like 2003 to chase the little guys away?

The (possibly) transient nature of yeast population has been mentioned here. So what? I am not sure that, over time and significant climactic changes, some of the aspects of terroir which are perceived to be permanent would not change either.

 

[Hank Beckmeyer]

originally posted by .sasha:


To SFJoe's point, I wonder if the population changes slightly every year, or if it takes an extreme situation like 2003 to chase the little guys away?

The (possibly) transient nature of yeast population has been mentioned here. So what? I am not sure that, over time and significant climactic changes, some of the aspects of terroir which are perceived to be permanent would not change either.

I have noted changes in yeasts during a harvest, vat vs vat of the same grapes, etc., so it certainly seems like a very fluid thang. Why wouldn't, on a grander, though slower scale, the overall terroir do the same thing?

 

[Ian Fitzsimmons]

originally posted by SFJoe:
...
(trying to be brief so Thor has more room)
I have heard the same thing from other growers. Marc Ollivier, for instance, feels that different yeast populations give different vintage expressions.

Makes plenty of sense that warm, sunny years could have different populations than cold, wet ones, in a primitive analysis.

Good point.

Just curious, if concern is about any amendment to the natural process, then do measures to slow down and extend fermentation, through, say, temperature manipulation, count as spoof?