What are these guys on about?

'Vauban who was ‘Maréchal de France’ at the time of Louis XIV suggested that “a truth that can hardly be disputed is that there is no difference between the best terroir and a bad one as long as it is not cultivated”.'

This does not mean what they seem to think it means....
 
Instead of their pocketbook or their palate, they are using calipers to determine differences among wines. By that standard, almost all wines are indistinguishable. (Same sort of nonsense you get from Consumer Reports, et alia.)
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Um...'Vauban who was ‘Maréchal de France’ at the time of Louis XIV suggested that “a truth that can hardly be disputed is that there is no difference between the best terroir and a bad one as long as it is not cultivated”.'
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He was a fortresss engineer, I believe, not a wine-maker. And, as you observe, that quote does not support their position. One of the giggles we can have at these oh-so-earnest types.
 
Even if one bought their experiments, they don't prove what they say they do. The story claims that judges can't taste the difference between higher priced and lower priced wines in blind tastings (big surprise). Since numbers of higher priced wines don't come from prized terroirs, as indeed the remarks about Oregon show, they have only shown that blind tasters don't always prefer the most expensive wine put in front of them.
 
More muddled reasoning I've rarely come across. From a starting point of testing "terroir," they rapidly begin to assert that different wines are of different "quality" (whatever in the hell that's supposed to mean) and that neither price nor reputation correlates particularly well with that ill-defined concept. In other breaking news, the sun rose in the East today.

Mark Lipton
 
It reads as though written by a non-native speaker, too. Was it badly translated from some other language?

What a jumble of ill-considered ideas.
 
I see an article like this every few weeks in various publications by various sources. The conspiracy theorist in me suspects that it’s just one facet of a guerrilla marketing strategy by suppliers of volume wine to maintain market share over luxury wine.
 
originally posted by David Erickson:
I guess they don't call it "The Dismal Science" for nothing.
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I think that moniker was applied because of Malthus, who forecast global famine based on human population growth eventually outstripping that of agricultural productivity. Foiled by the 'green revolution,' his idea nevertheless helped Darwin work out the natural selection portion of evolutionary theory.
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
originally posted by David Erickson:
I guess they don't call it "The Dismal Science" for nothing.
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I think that moniker was applied because of Malthus, who forecast global famine based on human population growth eventually outstripping that of agricultural productivity. Foiled by the 'green revolution,' his idea nevertheless helped Darwin work out the natural selection portion of evolutionary theory.
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The phrase is from Carlyle. The connection to Malthus is a supposition based on his applying the word dismal to Malthus as well, though the connection is not explicit.

Darwin said Malthus was the spark that led him to articulate natural selection. His journals, however, show a much more deliberate working toward the theory, with a lot of quite directed reading as a part of it, as well as copious correspondence with breeders. He did read Malthus but his autobiography rather dramatized the sequence of events.
 
originally posted by David Erickson:
What are these guys on about?I've read this a couple times and still cannot make sense of it.
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It kind of looks like the article was assembled by some artificial intelligence program that concluded these things are related, but had no grasp of the actual content or reasoning.

For example: "prices obtained at auction do not depend on natural endowments, but are the result of a well-understood choice of grapes that are adapted to soil qualities and weather conditions..." - what are the "natural endowments" of a vineyard if not soil and microclimate? I guess there's altitude and topography, but I think those four things pretty much define terroir.

Then there's this oddity: "Cross, Plantinga and Stavins (2011)... by analysing vineyard prices in Oregon... show that there are no significant price differences between plots that experts pretend to be of a different terroir quality." If you actually read the paper, this is a tortuous stretching of a conclusion that contrasts the impact of actual soil conditions vs. AVA on vineyard sale prices. And that paper includes the following: "Nevertheless, our results make clear that the concept of terroir matters economically, both to consumers and to wine producers. Buyers and sellers of vineyard parcels in the Willamette Valley of Oregon attach a significant premium to sub-AVA designations."

Even weirder, that same paper cites another study by Ashenfelter and Storchman (yes, the same people on the masthead of the article poo-pooing terroir): "Orley Ashenfelter and Karl Storchmann (2010) investigate the effects of climate on vineyards in the Mosel Valley. As in our study, the authors have fine-scale data on vineyard characteristics. They find that site characteristics — including slope, orientation, soil types, soil depth, and altitude — as well as solar radiation are significant determinants of vineyard quality."

What a mess.
 
Ah, I think I see what's going on here: Ashenfelter and Storchmann are just signing their names onto Ginsburgh's paper. Look at the rest of Ginsburgh's work and you'll see why I think that.
 
I have met (and dined with) Ginsburgh many years ago when he had less to say about wine than he does today. He is not a native English speaker though his spoken English was quite good. As an economist he can be a provocateur and has a sense of humor ("Ginsburgh, the only writer of this paper who contributed nothing to the Judgment of Princeton, wants nevertheless to point out that he did not even know that New Jersey produces wine.").

Most economists exit graduate school with a lot of economic tools in search of data sets on which to apply them and understand the tools far better than the data. This can lead to an unfortunate tendency to push hard on data sets that they do not understand well. There are lots of prices and points floating about and a lot of bad research beating on both.
 
While I find the article silly, I must say, does anyone doubt that in blind tastings, people would confuse terroirs, which is what their basic claim boils down to? This doesn't prove, of course, that they don't exist, and don't produce meaningfully different wines. It does, I think, at least suggest that we hold our beliefs about terroir and how it works with some less certainty.
 
Jonathan: If everyone had the same alleles then we might be able to define terroir a little more precisely. But, as we all have different "tools" to use, it's no surprise that scientific methods don't give the expected result.
 
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For example: "prices obtained at auction do not depend on natural endowments, but are the result of a well-understood choice of grapes that are adapted to soil qualities and weather conditions..." - what are the "natural endowments" of a vineyard if not soil and microclimate?...
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I guess if a vineyard is 'well-endowed', it doesn't have to brag.
 
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