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.
Well, that's not really any better. Because aside from our definitional disagreement, you go wrong when you replace your own beliefs with "we" (especially as followed by "only").
Obviously I still disagree that this is how or why we
should care about terroir, but now I'd just be repeating myself. (Sorry, Hank! I'll fill the space in other ways, I'm sure.)
at the cost of impoverishing the range of impacting variables
*shrug* I guess that if you don't see the utility of doing that when possible, then we can't possibly come to the vaguest accord on this or any other issue of linguistic utility. Surely we could expand the definition of "terroir" to "everything that affects the character of wine" by accepting the entire "range of impacting variables." We'll throw in your transients, Eric's culture and history, and many a thoughtful commentator on this issue has insisted we have to include man in this equation as well (though one might muse that Eric already has). That leaves us with only the specific type of grapevine sitting outside the perimeter of our definition, and so why leave
it out? OK...and now that terroir means "everything," why are we bothering with the word at all? (And when you figure it out, tell Florida Jim, because he'd like to know.)
I see weather as an integral aspect of climate, no less integral because irregular and unpredictable.
But Oswaldo, that's the very essence of the difference between weather and climate. It's raining today...that's weather. It rains here more often than it does over there...that's climate. You can only properly understand climate by observing weather in the least transient form possible. The two aren't synonyms. If you draw farming conclusions from a narrow observation of weather you're going to make a lot of really terrible mistakes. If you're drawing drinking conclusions from weather you're drawing, at most, conclusions about vintage. In neither case are you learning anything about terroir.
I admit, though, that you're the first person I've ever read willing to freely substitute weather for (meso)climate in
any definition of terroir, no matter how similar or dissimilar to mine, so I'm a little at a loss as to what else to say.
As with certain other transients (not all of them), it's the tendencies and the trends that are a property of the site. The rest is, well, transient. The rain-soaked vintage, the heat-paralysis vintage, the hail-destroyed vintage, the "perfect" vintage, the low-acid vintage, the grey rot vintage...all so wildly different. All equally emblematic of the terroir by your definition. But a drinker will, I think, search very long, very hard, and ultimately fruitlessly for terroir in those differences, perhaps even concluding that it doesn't exist on that site. (Actually, I don't know how you feel about that. Do you think a site always has a terroir? Does it matter that it can be discerned, or in other words does it exist independently of your ability to perceive it? What does your entirely likely perception that it's one thing one year, and that thing's exact opposite the next, mean regarding a site's terroir?)
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).
But they are so easily, even whimsically, changed. I can spray my way into something very close to 100% microbial turnover. Owning twenty rows of an allegedly uniform terroir, I can choose to do this to ten of the rows, doubling my available terroirs under your definition. Or twenty different chemical regimes, creating twenty different terroirs, which I can then release as higher-priced single-vineyard bottlings...
...you know, you might be on to something here. Someone call Gallo. They're gonna make
millions on this idea.
I see these things as part of terroir because they are part of nature, not the winemaker, and they are site-specific.
How do you feel about non-microbial nature? I assume you'd think that a eucalyptus tree dripping effluvia all over the grapes, some of it ending up in the fermentation tank, is part of that site's terroir. (Until we cut it down?) Birds? Animals? Does their site of residence change your stance? If birds nesting in a tree within the boundaries of a vineyard consume 100% of the grapes in that vineyard, year after year, does the site have a terroir or not? Or since you now can't drink the wine, maybe it would be your conclusion that it does not specifically because you no longer care if it does?
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
That would be true were my definition bounded in the fashion you describe. It's not. Within the boundaries I'm using, the terroir
can theoretically be modified (as with Gallo's earth-moving and pond-planting, or by nature over the long term as a result of erosion and such), but it almost never is. That way, all the decisions made by man -- what to plant, how to raise the vines, what to spray, what to kill, what to leave alive, when to harvest -- remain separable. And transient natural inputs -- pests, diseases, weather, other flora and fauna -- remain transient, easily modified by man and/or vintage effects. More/less reflective (of terroir) is indeed a continuum, and an interesting one, but it's entirely tangent to the separation I'm deploying.
Further, I admit I'm also having a very difficult time seeing how wildly variable (from vintage to vintage) human interventions can
ever be said to be anything but obscurative of terroir. This year, the grower does nothing. Next year, it's the full chemical arsenal. The year after that, it's another mad scientist's laboratory but in the cellar rather than the vineyard, because the fermentations just aren't going right without extensive help. All completely normal things that farmers and winemakers do. Except that when they do them, we of the meddlesome yet doctrinaire commentariat are almost always accusing them of (at best) interventionism, or (at worst) making wine to a preferred endpoint, rather than letting the wine reflect both its terroir and its vintage.
Ultimately, I look for wine to be both delicious and something I "approve" in terms of process.
This is the point where Jeff prods my touchiest nerve and says, "so...all that matters is what's in the glass, eh?"
So I dont, as you say, only care about how terroir manifests itself in how the wine tastes.
Now that is not what
I said. I said, following you, that it's the only thing you care about in terms of terroir, not that it's the only thing you care about in terms of
wine.
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.
High-minded. Which is why I'm confused that you outright encourage so much human meddling to preserve a terroir that, being full of unpredictable weather and fidgety wee beasties, doesn't want to sit particularly still.
I find intriguing the notion (that you put forth) that natural winemaking can actually obscure terroir
Oh, that's not my argument, that's Eric's. And not just his. I see his point, actually, though I'm still thinking it through. (I just deleted something like seven pages worth of blog post on this subject, because I'd argued myself into the exact opposite position I'd started with. So I need to rethink that one.)
So, we have a situation where those who use ambient/spontaneous yeasts think theyre crucial and those who dont use them think theyre not.
And yet we continually laud the latter as exemplars of terroir expression. Funny, that. (You may take the sarcasm in any or all of the multiple directions it was intended to point.)
I tend to start revving up the mental filters when winemakers insist most stridently on the rightness of what happens to be exactly what they, themselves, are doing this year. And last year, when they did something else? Why, that was entirely correct and necessary too. And their neighbor, who does something yet again different but seems to make terroir-expressive wines? Satan incarnate, of course. Until the afternoon appointment, when you get a similar-sounding harangue from said neighbor, with only the techniques and the names swapped.
