A Saumur Champigny worthy of mention

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originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
I don't see how you can support the use of used oak barrels without accepting the use of new oak barrels. Where do you think the used barrels come from?
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They could easily come from winemakers/wineries who like to use new oak. Cru bourgeois estates have generally bought used barrels from cru classé producers, for example.

I don't view the "grail of terroir expression" as limited to what "come from the vine." The point of winemaking and wine-aging is a transformation of what comes from the vine. Elevage is as much a part of wine as the growing season. Oak barrels have long been essential to the traditional expression of most French wines and that's part of the grail of terroir expression to me. Haut-Brion in steel tank wouldn't be the same Haut-Brion anymore.
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I completely disagree with this reasoning. You are correct that Haut-Brion wouldn't taste like you know it - and the personality of Graves, it could be argued, might overpower the oak - but that elevage is part of terroir makes no sense. Terroir is site-specificity, not winemaking (though winemaking can help to avoid masking terroir).
 
Lots of definitions of terroir out there. I used to be more sympathetic to the literal definition of soil + climate, and I certainly won't dispute that that's probably the more technically correct definition. Nevertheless there is a more holistic use of the term to refer to a sense of place, and that's the definition that interests me more. I find room in that definition to include the people and traditional practices of a region. There's a good scene in one of the Mondovino episodes where Neal Rosenthal takes Jonathan Nossiter to an old style New York diner and says something like, "Look around you, now that's terroir." I agree with him and I find that kind of terroir more interesting than mere soil + climate.

And yes, of course it is technically possible to buy used barrels from someone else and never use them oneself. But I reject the idea that there is some kind of Platonic ideal practice that would require that kind of transaction. A search for moral purity that depends for its continued existence on someone else's sin, somewhere, is indelibly tainted. And this still doesn't respond to my more practical point that many use new oak for the more Disorderly-acceptable purpose of cellar hygiene and not as a spice rack. Regardless, my basic point is more simple. Any dogma that requires me to condemn DRC, Dujac, Jayer, all the Bordeaux first growths, Clos Rougeard, etc. etc. etc., is defective from the get-go.
 
I also find this passage from the Wine-Terroirs profile of Richard Leroy entirely convincing:

"Richard Leroy has a lot of things to say about barrels, their input on wines, and also on the cooperages, which he says don't sell the same products to different wineries even when the casks is supposed to have the same wood and parameters. that's a tricky issue but he got proof through tastings of wines made through exactly the same type of barrel coming from the same cooperage injust an hour, the time to drive between two Burgundy wineries, the second one being La Romanée Conti. He says that as he initially was a tasting geek, he developped an almost monomaniac expertise on wines including the wood input in the wines, this was getting to a point where himself thought he was going too far with these tasting experiences. When he was a serial taster he tasted lots of Bordeaux wines where wood is very important, he loved the wood input by the way, he remembers when he tasted his first Branaire wines, he loved the toast. In Bordeaux there's a wine-sample tasting every year where cooperages get compared blind, this is inherent to the local culture. In the Loire in comparison, at least for himself the wood has to be ideally bypassed at the tasting, it must pass unnoticed. That's what he told to the Taransaud director Henri de Pracomtal who asked him once while visiting here, what sort of wood input he'd liked. He said he wanted the wine to show as if no wood had been around. For that purpose, the bousinage (end toasting of the barrel) is very important, it must be adapted to each type of wood, this is some sort of cauterization lasting a certain amount of time. The guys who do this job has the expertise and the intuition of a top restaurant chef, by the way you need 7 to 8 years to be master this crucial art. Wood imprint is not necessarily negative, Richard says, when you make a great medoc you want this aromatic input of the wood, even though now there is a trend for lowering this new wood."

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www.wineterroirs.com
 
I agree with Keith's definition of terroir. It really is the French dictionary definition of the meaning of the word and has been for a very long time. And I do think it applies to longstanding traditional practices. Just as Keith doesn't like any CdP, regardless of traditional practice, I'd say the same about new oak, though. It may be that it's been in use for a long time. That doesn't make it better.

Using used barrels isn't just technically possible. It's quite common.And, of course, it doesn't take advantage of someone else's sin, just someone else's bad taste. And as I said before, if no one wanted the effects of non-neutral oak, you can be sure that pre-used barrels would be buyable. It's not a larger technical leap than pre-stressed jeans. Really, an argument that somehow it's impossible not to use barrels that infuse flavor is just silly.
 
Obviously oak has become ingrained in the esthetics of so many for so long that wines that have it in spades have become paradigms of greatness, but there is nothing absolutely or objectively superior about that paradigm. It is a construct like any other.

Wineries like "DRC, Dujac, Jayer, Bordeaux first growths, Clos Rougeard, etc." deliver with particular excellence the breed standard that bathes beautiful fruit in new oak.

Instead, the esthetic that seems much more interesting to me, certainly from the point of view of natural wine, is one where only things from the vine are acceptable, because then we have no extraneous inputs. I agree that such an esthetic implies, or requires in order to make sense, the definition of terroir as soil + climate, but that is the only definition that makes sense to me, because I really think that if one starts to include what people do after the grapes are picked, the concept of terroir becomes diluted to the point of uselessness. Of course people have to do things to the grapes after they are picked, but that is the sphere of winemaking, not what I call terroir.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Obviously oak has become ingrained in the esthetics of so many for so long that wines that have it in spades have become paradigms of greatness, but there is nothing absolutely or objectively superior about that paradigm. It is a construct like any other.

Wineries like "DRC, Dujac, Jayer, Bordeaux first growths, Clos Rougeard, etc." deliver with particular excellence the breed standard that bathes beautiful fruit in new oak.

Instead, the esthetic that seems much more interesting to me, certainly from the point of view of natural wine, is one where only things from the vine are acceptable, because then we have no extraneous inputs. I agree that such an esthetic implies, or requires in order to make sense, the definition of terroir as soil + climate, but that is the only definition that makes sense to me, because I really think that if one starts to include what people do after the grapes are picked, the concept of terroir becomes diluted to the point of uselessness. Of course people have to do things to the grapes after they are picked, but that is the sphere of winemaking, not what I call terroir.
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I agree. Terroir is not an old-style NYC diner; that's cultural (if you will) heritage and tradition, which is quite different. Neal was kidding.

I do think that a winemaker can take many steps to avoid masking terroir: using native yeast; good cellar sanitation to avoid brett; not using new oak; topping barrels to avoid VA; not filtering to avoid stripping natural aromatics, etc.
 
If you want a word that includes climate + soil, you should say that, or maybe agricultural conditions. The word "terroir," which is French after all, and which is always used with certain resonances, means what it means and it is not that. You can't have those resonances and then reduce the word to a meaning that doesn't rightly carry them, except by linguistic fiddling. Of course, if you say "agricultural conditions," and you lose the resonances connected with saying "terroir," your defense of wanting wines to reflect terroir will also necessarily change.

Keith, you called using only old barrels "technically possible." It was that characterization that I was calling silly. I think that term is needlessly offensive and I withdraw it and call it an empirically inaccurate specification instead.
 
Jonathan, I couldn't disagree more. I don't even agree with "it means what it means," since there is disagreement about what the meaning of it is. And I am perfectly aware of the French resonances, and accept no other. It is in their spirit that I believe the word means only soil + climate, sans linguistic fiddling of any kind. And it is in the French spirit that the word will mean what can only be found in a specific place an nowhere else.

We may disagree about the definition of terroir, but I think most reasonable people will agree that intrinsic to the concept is some notion of site-specificity. Otherwise, what's the point of having the concept?

The quote above about Richard Leroy tells us what we already know, that barrel usage and degree of toast are winemaker choices that depend on personal preference, not the site (unless your vineyard is in the Allier forest). And, speaking of Allier, if, let's say, the ideal oak barrel is a Taransaud with well-seasoned Allier oak, then it's quite feasible that DRC uses some Taransaud with well-seasoned Allier oak, Dujac uses some Taransaud with well-seasoned Allier oak, Jayer used some Taransaud with well-seasoned Allier oak, Bordeaux first growths use some Taransaud with well-seasoned Allier oak, Clos Rougeard used some Taransaud with well-seasoned Allier oak. Anyone claiming that this Taransaud with well-seasoned Allier oak is part of their terroir makes a mockery of the term (no news there) and has to forego any notion of site-specificity, making the concept useless.
 
i'ms surprised that producers like domaine charvin (all concrete) or louis michel (all stainless) haven't been mentioned in this thread.
 
Oswaldo,

There is no disagreement among French dictionaries about what the word means nor in French usage. In that sense the word means what it means, regardless of your desire to limit that meaning. Further, if the term "agricultural conditions," which is what you want it to mean, had the resonances of the term terroir, which come from the French definition, you wouldn't need to bother with the French word. Indeed, why do you? The term " agricultural conditions" conveys the meaning you say you want without unnecessary confusion.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Oswaldo,

There is no disagreement among French dictionaries about what the word means nor in French usage. In that sense the word means what it means, regardless of your desire to limit that meaning. Further, if the term "agricultural conditions," which is what you want it to mean, had the resonances of the term terroir, which come from the French definition, you wouldn't need to bother with the French word. Indeed, why do you? The term " agricultural conditions" conveys the meaning you say you want without unnecessary confusion.
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No one is going to use the maladroit term "agricultural conditions." It is reductive to an extreme and fails to encompass the full meaning of terroir which clearly includes the culture of the place, in fact: the taste of the place.

This might help, too, to narrow the discussion to wine and vines (or not):

L'Organisation internationale de la vigne et du vin (OIV) a adopté une résolution officielle du concept de terroir lors de son congrès annuel en juin 2010 à Tbilissi en Géorgie. « Le terroir vitivinicole est un concept qui se réfère à un espace sur lequel se développe un savoir collectif des interactions entre un milieu physique et biologique identifiable et les pratiques vitivinicoles appliquées, qui confèrent des caractéristiques distinctives aux produits originaires de cet espace »
 
O., where this discussion gets fraught is with the need for yeast to do the fermentation. Studies have shown that even in the most noninterventionist cellars, the ecosystem of yeasts that perform the fermentation are complex and often involve commercial yeasts that have colonized the winery. So, how does this affect the concept of terroir? Are there site-specific yeast populations? Do they respect the boundaries of e.g. the Touraine? I don't know if anyone knows the answer to this, but certainly we can't ignore the influence of the yeast on shaping the character of the wine.

Microbial Mark Lipton
 
Mark, if there are descendants on non-native yeasts, and presumably there are most of the time, then the expression of that particular terroir (understood as soil, climate, and microbial life, including yeasts and bacteria) will be slightly less. One can hope that, if nothing else is done to interfere (e.g., oak), then perhaps the "interference" from such descendant yeasts will be negligible. But descendants yeasts do not, in and of themselves, create a semantic problem for this definition.

Jonathan, granted, I can see that the links above include what people do to the grapes if the doing is traditional. So inoculation, chaptalization, acidulation, oak barrels, filtering and fining, SO2, all become part of this all-embracing definition of terroir.

I can only lament a definition that allows inputs from elsewhere; it is so inclusive as to be meaningless, and therefore useless. Under this definition, any terroir that is not a monopole becomes as many terroirs as there are owners. Contiguous plots in a Burgundy lieu with identical soil compositions, heights, and slopes, but with four owners, become four separate terroirs because each will do something different to their grapes. That makes a mockery of the phrase "terroir expression." I know you didn't create this definition, I am just ranting at its utter stupidity.
 
Terroir is a perfectly good word for what it was meant to express, which is the specific sense that a place in its totality has. It was meant to be able to refer as much to the terroir of Pagnol as the terroir of a specific vineyard. It was never meant to be a bright, red line of a denotative term. It is useless to you because you want it to do something it won't do, limit itself to growing conditions but carry all the resonance of that mystical sense of place, make wine special while not being really usable for something like the terroir of broccoli. So now you can criticize me for endorsing the definition and not merely noting it.
 
Why not usable for other things? The sum of soil, climate, and microbial life could be used for anything that grows.

But you're right, I am disappointed that you endorse a definition that includes cellar practices.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Why not usable for other things? The sum of soil, climate, and microbial life could be used for anything that grows.

But you're right, I am disappointed that you endorse a definition that includes cellar practices.
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So, just refer to growing conditions or some similar phrase and have done with it. It gets you all you want and nothing you don't. You don't make war against words with meanings you don't want to use when you can perfectly well express the meanings you do with some other word or words.
 
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