Soil and Wine Flavor

I wonder what role regional micro-organisms play in the terroir-associated flavor melange. Would be cool to do samplings among commercial and natural yeast devotees in, say, a Chablis 1er vineyard, and analyze statistically relative to prominent flavor components.

You'd have to sample from a fair number of producers, I guess, to control for the other elements of individuals' winemaking styles - tant pis.
 
originally posted by Oliver McCrum:
Chaad,

I don't import wines that are oaky or point-chasing, so there won't be a problem.

My new Vulture producer, in fact, was once told by an American importer that her wines weren't oaky enough.
Click to expand...

Merle Haggard's in the wine business now?
 
originally posted by Steve Edmunds:
originally posted by Oliver McCrum:
Chaad,

I don't import wines that are oaky or point-chasing, so there won't be a problem.

My new Vulture producer, in fact, was once told by an American importer that her wines weren't oaky enough.
Click to expand...

Merle Haggard's in the wine business now?
Click to expand...
Only one answer to that:
 
originally posted by Steve Edmunds:
originally posted by Oliver McCrum:
Chaad,

I don't import wines that are oaky or point-chasing, so there won't be a problem.

My new Vulture producer, in fact, was once told by an American importer that her wines weren't oaky enough.
Click to expand...

Merle Haggard's in the wine business now?
Click to expand...

'Ah'm an Okie from Basilicata' doesn't flow, true
 
I think Steve deserves thanks....seems to me the Bakersfield terroir has already been scientifically proven to show up in Merle's whines.
 
originally posted by chaad thomas:

With regards to soil, I'd take a look at how vitric the subsoils are in the volcanic regions, and check for correlation to quality there. I'd suspect that vigorous, deeper rooting rootstocks (e.g. 110R or 1103P such as are used for aglianico) might fare better in those environments.

Does any of that correlate to pinot noir grown in Oregon, on the volcanic Jory soil there? I dunno.
Click to expand...

I don't know about this much, but our basalt - in deeper Jory and thinner Nekia soil types primarily - don't seem vitric at all. Acid soils, full of clay. Up in the Cascades there is lots of obsidian. Definitely vitric. Wear shoes unless you want to get cut. No grapes growing up there to speak of though.
 
The non-vitric volcanic soil (i.e. Andosols) typically have high macro-porosity which gives the soil excellent drainage and a light, compaction-resistant texture that roots can easily penetrate.

Vitric Andosols have much lower water holding capacity, with sand, pumice, and low clay content, well, short range order (SROC) clays, anyway.

Getting more to your question of why vitric makes a difference [to wine] I have no idea. Highly vitric soils, which have a coarse texture, can inhibit worms and biodiversity; maybe that's a factor. Maybe non-vitric soils support deep-rooting vines better; that could be it.
 
Chaad, how rootstock dependent do you think it is? I've seen literature on scion clone selection, but haven't really come across a lot on rootstock selection. Any recommendations?
 
Yixin,

I'm really not an expert in this area at all, but have gleaned bits of insight from an agronomist friend in Matera and reading here and there. I don't understand the mechanisms, or have enough info to compare sites and results in a meaningful way.

In an effort to answer question more directly, I have no idea how much rootstock plays into all of this. I don't know which rootstocks are commonly used where, or whether they might share common characteristics. There are rootstock guides, such as http://www.californiagrapevine.com/images/Chart 2.pdf that can be referenced, and maybe that could lead to better understanding.

Using the examples we've already discussed here, one could ask do the predominant rootstocks used in Oregon Jory sites share the same characteristics as the rootstocks used in the Vulture area? As those on Etna?

Does Oregon pinot even show that characteristic "volcanic quality" that Oliver is talking about? What about paleosoils? It's complex stuff that I've not had the chutzpah to get into seriously, being content to drink great wines as I am!

One thing that I've kind of been using as a quiet, but working, hypothesis is that friable, fertile volcanic soils allow deep, complex, root system development, which works along the lines of the old vine thing, i.e. that old vines produce more characterful fruit. Do old vines also have more complex root systems? It stands to reason, no?

Lots of questions, few answers (from me, anyway)!
 
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