A Saumur Champigny worthy of mention

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originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
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.
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This yeast nonsense has spun completely out of control.

Let's stipulate for a moment to your terroir definition (or as the Professor has convincingly explained, your terroir re-definition) to cover the dirt but not the culture of a place. For the reasons I've already gone through, I think there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in that philosophy, but at the very least I'm willing to admit that there are aspects of terroir so understood that relate to real differences in wine and the reasons people prefer one wine over another one. Exposition, for example, is going to result in real and replicable differences in wine and account for the difference between that perfectly situated mid-slope grand cru and the nosebleed village plot up in the hills that never ripens quite as well and has those coarser tannins. The reason we care about terroir is because the differences in those two sites are interesting to observe and to preserve.

At some point, whoever sits on the self-appointed Supreme Court of Natural Wine decided that because selected yeasts could be used to impart particular flavors and control other characteristics, suddenly native yeast was a part of terroir. The problem is that this decision was reached WITHOUT any demonstration that the difference in the yeast population between, say, La Romanee-Conti and Les Beaux Monts played any part whatsoever in the qualities that make La Romanee-Conti and Les Beaux Monts taste different from one another. Indeed, there has not even been any demonstration that differences in native yeast populations respect in any way the historic boundaries from one terroir to the next (it goes without saying that none of the monks and other figures lost to history who mapped out the terroirs we care about so dearly knew the first thing about microbes). This is a wholly unnecessary dogma. You don't need to make any terroir claims on behalf of yeast in order to oppose the use of designer yeasts to spoof a wine.

Separately...

The more I think about it, the more difficult it seems to be to sustain any definition of terroir that wholly excludes historical tradition. Oswaldo earlier defined terroir as what "come from the vine." But what "come from the vine" is defined as much as anything by what vine was planted there in the first place. Would Chambertin planted to cabernet sauvignon still represent Chambertin? Only in the most hyperliteral sense that it represents what some idiot decided to plant in Chambertin at some arbitrary moment in time -- not in the sense that facilitates any understanding of typicity, which is one of the main reasons we care about terroir in the first place. We care about a Chambertin being true-to-terroir because there is an ideal of Chambertin typicity out there rooted in its terroir. But it is also rooted in people and in history. And no, this does not mean that four different owners equates to four different terroirs. The four owners are carrying on (likely with varying degrees of dedication and success) something that existed before them and will exist after them.
 
In my breadmaking experience, sourdough yeast almost always overcomes store bought yeast after a few different proofings. I would guess, unless a store bought yeast is truly unusually aggressive, like snake head fish, they will be overcome by natural vineyard yeast if they are not completely reinoculated. An environment will clean itself up--except of course when it doesn't.
 
The most interesting thing a wine can do for me other than taste good is represent a place. That is indeed interesting (and fun) to observe and preserve.

But the main reason I am interested in natural wine is not for my health, though that is, of course, welcome. I truly believe that the less you intervene, the more the wine will reflect its place. The constituents of place are soil, topography, exposure, climate, microbial life of the soil, yeasts, etc. (obviously some of these terms overlap).

However, one of the ironies of natural wine is that so many are semi-carbonic, which tends, for my palate at least, to obscure the sense of place by somewhat homogenizing the results.

The Cluny monks must have tried planting different grapes and came to the conclusion that certain grapes gave the best results, and then they graded the plots according to how good these results were. The consensus arose that pinot noir and chardonnay were the varieties which best expressed Burgundian terroir. This is a commonplace that we all have heard or read a million times. Now I am being told that pinot noir and chardonnay don't express terroir, but rather they are part and parcel of terroir. The monks too, and their successor winemakers too, are all part of terroir. So once cannot say anymore that pinot noir and chardonnay are better at expressing Burgundian terroir than other grapes because they, too, are part of terroir.

Keith, since vines and grapes are not included in what I consider to be a useful definition of terroir (broccoli can also express terroir), cabernet sauvignon planted in Chambertin would still express Chambertin, but it would be said that pinot noir expresses it better, plausibly because it is a more transparent vehicle, whereas cabernet sauvignon carries a stronger stamp. One could even say that grapes with very strong individual characteristics are less good vehicles for terroir than more neutral grapes.

The yeasts that grape skins accumulate in the vineyard, and which later make the grapes ferment, are obviously part of the sense of place, and the use of yeasts from elsewhere detracts from that sense of place.
 
Pinot Noir, being one of the oldest of current extant varieties of vitis vinifera, probably predates the Cluny monks and may go back to the origin of wines in Burgundy, around the first century. I doubt those Cluny monks did much experimenting with grape varieties, at least for the reds. If it indeed does express growing conditions better than other varieties, that's just dumb luck.
 
...cabernet sauvignon planted in Chambertin would still express Chambertin, but it would be said that pinot noir expresses it better, plausibly because it is a more transparent vehicle, whereas cabernet sauvignon carries a stronger stamp...
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So much essentialism.

How are we to know what this 'real' Chambertin tastes like?

To me it seems more reasonable that terroir is a concept that helps us understand why products grown in different places will tend to taste different.

As such, I agree that it is not very useful to include cellar practices in the definition.

But, I also find it difficult to conceptualize a 'real taste' of a particular location because that will change over time due to weather changes (year to year or long-term climate change) and of course because of the infinite amount of decisions that go into farming the various locations.
 
originally posted by Rahsaan:

But, I also find it difficult to conceptualize a 'real taste' of a particular location because that will change over time due to weather changes (year to year or long-term climate change) and of course because of the infinite amount of decisions that go into farming the various locations.
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So true. But I think that Keith's statement "The more I think about it, the more difficult it seems to be to sustain any definition of terroir that wholly excludes historical tradition," is fundamentally flawed as many traditions obscured terroir. Rampant overcropping, typical until recently, led to dilute wines and often underripe grapes. Another tradition which Elio Altare told me about was the fact that his father put Barolo into demijohns which were then placed on the roof to accelerate aging in wines that were typically macerated for weeks after fermentation. The practice led to oxidized wines; I suspect that you could taste the place less, as was the case with poor barrel sanitation (another traditional practice) which invariably caused bacterial off-odors.
 
What Keith said is not that all traditions are good or that all traditions don't obscure the effects of growing conditions but that no definition of terroir can wholly exclude historical tradition. Thus your examples of "bad" traditions are beside the point. I'm not sure Keith is right, by the way. If we stopped talking about terroir and started talking about growing conditions, I'm not sure what the problem would be.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
What Keith said is not that all traditions are good or that all traditions don't obscure the effects of growing conditions but that no definition of terroir can wholly exclude historical tradition. Thus your examples of "bad" traditions are beside the point. I'm not sure Keith is right, by the way. If we stopped talking about terroir and started talking about growing conditions, I'm not sure what the problem would be.
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Of course, you are correct that "wholly" is a key to the meaning. However, there are so many traditions that are bad in agricultural practices (and particularly cellar practices) that without examples it is hard to understand which aspects of tradition are part of true terroir (and I don't discount that they exist), but I tend to believe that the bad traditions might outweigh the good. You do realize that your tone - compared to your usual erudite and civil commentary - sounds rather, well, combative. We can disagree, as clearly we do on this.
 
It depends on what we are disagreeing on. The issue of defining terroir is what the word means, not what we want it to mean or what it would be better for it to mean for discussing issues of non-interventionist winemaking. I would say I'm being pedantic, not combative.
 
I'm not suggesting that there is some "real" Chambertin out there waiting to be expressed. I doubt a broccoli from Chambertin would have any flavor in common with a banana from Chambertin. With wine, it's more like circling the caravans. After comparing so many Vosnes to so many Chambolles, maybe one has a more or less vague sense of the terroir that is lurking behind each denomination (and then each different part will have some variation on that). But, of course, now the terroir no longer lurks behind, it includes vines and grapes and winemakers and oak barrels. I should be grateful it doesn't include us as well.

Jonathan, early ripening pinot may express growing conditions better in Burgundy, while late ripening Grenache may express growing conditions better in the southern Rhône. I doubt dumb luck has any role to play in either extreme.
 
I very much doubt it had much to do with trial and error experimentation either. I can't find speculations about the history of varieties in the Rhone with quick Google searches and JLL doesn't have much of it. I do know that despite the fact that winemaking there predates winemaking in Burgundy, it mostly didn't exist between the first century and the 13th or so. At that point, the main grape was grenache, I think. I don't even know that grenache is the optimal grape there, if there is such a thing. Beaucastel makes a good case for mourvedre. I haven't read much history of winemaking there that really goes back before C19. I do know that history is usually a humbling lesson in how much that we think was inevitable was wildly contingent (which is a fancy term for dumb luck).
 
I also think brett, VA, and many naturele wine practices suck. I know good wine (according to me) when I drink it, or what I like, and drinking by intellection seems like a futile pursuit, as I suspect at the end of the day it is for everyone on the thread. We like what we like.
 
If drinking by ideology qualifies as drinking by intellection, then I would have to plead guilty. I try to find delicious things, but that more or less follow the general ideology I want to support.

That said, I don't think natural wines are more prone to brett, but I would agree that they are more prone to v.a. Also yeast flavors, reduction, CO2, and unintended oxidation.

I have found that drinking a lot of natural wine has impacted my taste, and made me slightly, and I stress slightly, more tolerant.
 
This may be the distinction we are arguing about. I don't like spoofed wines because they taste like simulacrums of real wines to me. And I just don't much like new oak, period. And to the extent that I can identify place in wine by any taste that connects it to that place, I enjoy that. But I keep my theorizing for my theories and drink wine to enjoy wine. I find I do both things better that way.
 
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