Terroir

O

Oswaldo Costa

Oswaldo Costa
I couldn't locate a recent discussion in which I defended a definition of terroir that excluded what people do to grapes after they are picked, while Jonathan, Keith, and others defended one that included what happens afterwards (e.g., blocking malo) if the practices are customary or traditional. At the time, I did a google search on the meaning of terroir, read half a dozen definitions, and had to grudgingly concede that mine was not consensual.

Yesterday I got into a similar discussion in a Portuguese wine forum in which most claimed that terroir did not include man, and this time I maintained that, even though that would have been my definition, the reality "out there" was that the consensus included man. Once again I did a google search to find some definitions to back up this assertion and, to my puzzlement, I could no longer find the ones from the previous search (though I don't remember the exact terms I used the first time around).

So, this morning I jotted down the bias of the first twenty definitions that I found. Differing credibilities, of course. Seventeen of them could be said to be friendly to excluding man, and three to including man. I don't want to restart that tiresome argument again, just want to note that, for what it's worth, on November 17, 2017, the first twenty definitions, found without any selection bias of mine, do not seem to include vinification practices:

Biased towards soil & climate only:

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en.wikipedia.org

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en.oxforddictionaries.com

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www.dictionary.com

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winefolly.com

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www.merriam-webster.com

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www.thefreedictionary.com

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www.collinsdictionary.com

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www.wineanorak.com

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www.coravin.com

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www.jancisrobinson.com

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www.houstonpress.com

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mttaborfinewines.com

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vigneronsdeseve.org

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www.clos19.com

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www.nytimes.com

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vinepair.com

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www.winespectator.com

Biased towards including human practices:

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en.wiktionary.org

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www.vivino.com

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www.musingsonthevine.com
 
As I remember, I was citing French dictionary definitions since the word is, after all, French. Because many wine people want Oswaldo's definition, I expect that citations from English sites and wine sites may lead to different results. I can't stop the shift in language. This morning I heard NPR refer to grape varieties as varietals and I've given up on the original meaning of begging the question. But I have a rational plea to make: the French definition of terroir contains a valuable meaning and it would be a shame to lose it. There are numbers of English two word phrases that would achieve the limitation Oswaldo and others want such as, and really just for instance, environmental conditions. Why not use one of those terms for that desired meaning?
 
My favorite definition of terroir is the scene in Mondovino where Neal Rosenthal is driving Jonathan Nossiter through Brooklyn and gestures at all the Chassidim and says, "Now THAT's terroir."
 
Here's another one.

"I learned thereafter to love the wines of France, village by village, vineyard by vineyard, while retaining only the vaguest idea of the grapes used to make them, and with no standard of comparison that would tell me whether those grapes, planted in other soils and blessed by other place-names, would produce a similar effect. From the moment of my fall, I was a terroiriste, for whom the principal ingredient in any bottle is the soil.

"By 'soil' I do not mean only the physical mix of limestone, topsoil and humus. I mean the soil as Jean Giono, Giovanni Verga or D.H. Lawrence would describe it: nurse of passions, stage of dramas, and habitat of local gods. The deities from which the villages of France take their names--whether pagan, as in Mercurey and Julienas, or Christian, as in St Amour and St Joseph--are the guardians of vines that have acquired their character not only from the minerals that they suck from the rocks beneath them, but also from the sacrificial rites of lasting communities....

"My defence of terroir, in other words, is not merely a reference to that outcrop of Bathonian limestone under the marl of Le Montrachet. It includes the Duchy of Burgundy as a moral idea; it includes the Latin name of Puliagnicus, and the other name, Montrachet, in which both t's are unpronounced, and the many names around it--Les Chalumeaux, Les Referts, ls Clos des Meix, Les Folatieres--names not so much bestowed as discovered in the long encoutner between man and soil; it includes the centuries of viticulture under the watchful eye of the Cistercian Abbey of Maizieres; it includes the vineyards, with their dry stone walls and wooden gates, and the plateau of Mont Rachet, which catches every drop of sunlight, dawn to dusk. All this and more goes into that wine, which, in the opinion of Alexandre Dumas, you should drink on your knees, with head bared in reverence--a wine which is the very distillation of the virtue that the Greeks called aidos, the candid recognition that the other is more important than yourself."

--Roger Scruton, I Drink, Therefore I Am
 
Also of note:

"Terroir has never been fixed, in taste or in perception. It has always been an evolving expression of culture.... Before, the sense of a terroir would evolve over generations, hundreds of years, allowing for the slow accretion of knowledge and experience to build into sedimentary layers, like the geological underpinning of a given terroir itself." --Nossiter, Liquid Memory
 
O, speaking as one elitist to another, this populist, crowd-sourced definition of a sophisticate's topic will not do. No, no.

Let us consult fewer but better sources. I have here two pieces by Joe Dressner (one, two). The first pretty much excludes the winemaker from terroir; the second one does not explicitly put him/her back but seems to give priority.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion I found was from Randall Grahm.

Finally, though not from a well-known hand, this article on the elevation of Cairanne is thorough... and describes terroir as a combination of "soil, grapes varieties, and tradition" without saying more about which traditions are included.

I believe terroir is real, though it is possible that it is a convenience term for a number of other yet-to-be-identified things. For me, even if the latter obtains, it does not discredit or void the term.

At this point I offer two anecdotes.

The first concerns epiphenomena. If I ask you to point to the part of a pocket watch that keeps the time, you couldn't do it. Sure, there is a spring and its behavior is describable by vectors and forces, and there is a dial that is artwork covered in sigils (yet, it is a piece of paper still), and there are hands that are just pointy sticks, and so on. Yet, somehow, the combination of this ticking, spinning thing plus the observer makes time-keeping. Is terroir the watch and the vigneron the observer?

The second is joke: Three baseball umpires are talking about their approach to the game. The first, an old hand, announces, "I calls 'em as I sees 'em." The second umpire, almost as old but having been ruined by a college education in Semantics, pipes up with, "I calls 'em as they is." They turn to look at their colleague who, not at all dazzled by homey aphorisms, says, "Until I calls 'em, they ain't."

(By which I mean to observe that without a vigneron to make the wine there is nothing to taste, for good or for ill.)
 
I learned thereafter to love the wines of France, village by village, vineyard by vineyard, while retaining only the vaguest idea of the grapes used to make them, and with no standard of comparison that would tell me whether those grapes, planted in other soils and blessed by other place-names, would produce a similar effect...
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Maybe it's the student in me, but grape has always been a critical component of wine. Obviously not isolated from the region/land. But it seems completely ignorant to ignore the grape!
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
The first concerns epiphenomena. If I ask you to point to the part of a pocket watch that keeps the time, you couldn't do it. Sure, there is a spring and its behavior is describable by vectors and forces, and there is a dial that is artwork covered in sigils (yet, it is a piece of paper still), and there are hands that are just pointy sticks, and so on. Yet, somehow, the combination of this ticking, spinning thing plus the observer makes time-keeping. Is terroir the watch and the vigneron the observer?
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No.
 
originally posted by Rahsaan:
I learned thereafter to love the wines of France, village by village, vineyard by vineyard, while retaining only the vaguest idea of the grapes used to make them, and with no standard of comparison that would tell me whether those grapes, planted in other soils and blessed by other place-names, would produce a similar effect...
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Maybe it's the student in me, but grape has always been a critical component of wine. Obviously not isolated from the region/land. But it seems completely ignorant to ignore the grape!
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Here is some fuller context of that part:

"Wine criticism, as we know it today, was the invention of a literary critic, Professor George Saintsbury, who published his pioneering Notes on a Cellar Book in 1920. Not a single grape varietal [sic] is mentioned in that book, which dwells on the vineyards, villages and vintages represented in the Professor's cellar over a full drinking life. Saintsbury does not treat his reader to 'tasting notes', which he dismisses as 'wine slang'. A wine, for him, was an individual, not to be assimilated to a type or a brand; each taste was the inimitable signature of a place and the traditions established there, among which the choice of grape is only one. And in my view (which I shall try later to justify) wine should always be approached in this way, if it is to open the way to serious meditation. 'Nothing makes the future so rosy,' Napoleon remarked, 'as to contemplate it through a glass of Chambertin', and we instantly respond to the sentiment. But suppose he had said 'nothing makes the future so rosy, as to contemplate it through a glass of Pinor Noir'? The word 'contemplate' would have lost its resonance, and the remark, no longer associating the greatest risk-taker of his day with a tranquil plot of earth in Burgundy, would have been flushed clean of its pathos and its spiritual truth."

Incidentally, the idea that Saintsbury dismissed "tasting notes" as "wine slang" seems to me to refute the earlier claim that Saintsbury is the inventor of modern wine criticism. But when you search for the text "slang" in Saintsbury's book, it's not clear he's referring to written tasting notes or just the way people talk about wine.

The first of two references is, in reference to Hermitage, "And as to the flavour one might easily go into dithyrambs. Wine-slang talks of the 'finish' in such cases...."

Dithyrambs! What a wonderful word! I had to look it up.

noun
plural noun: dithyrambs
a wild choral hymn of ancient Greece, especially one dedicated to Dionysus.
a passionate or inflated speech, poem, or other writing.
 
I agree. I never say that one of my favorite wines is 'pinot noir'. (Or god forbid 'pinot') But it does seem essential (for me) to know what grapes they are growing in Chambertin!
 
The watch metaphor is something of a mystification. The time the watch tells is a human convention regarding what the needles the dial indicate. It is the function of the watch to produce this conventional information and the various parts each play a role in that function. But a function isn't a thing,so one would hardly think to find a part of the watch that was identical to it.

These Yeats lines may be more of what you are trying to get at:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

It's almost a dithyramb.
 
I do not know how we can separate the "impacts of the vigneron" from the "impact of the land" on the wine, when we consider that most of the land never produced Vitis vinifera until the native plants were removed and some vigneron planted grapes. How can we not have reshaped the impact of the soil on the grapes after the soil has changed from having grapes grown on it (with whatever various soil management/composting/recapture/biodynamic/organic/fertilization/irrigation techniques) for 20 or 50 or 500 years? I know, this does not impact the bedrock however many feet down it may be, but it has a huge impact on the way the rainwater gets to the shallower roots. The soil is not immutable. Just changing the nitrogen fixing character of the land from what its native species would have produced to what viticulture produces will alter the mix for as long as the land stays in production.

The impact of man cannot be limited to what happens after the grapes are picked.

This is even more important in the new world, where noble varieties never even existed.
 
You guys are the best responders that any O in Yeats could hope for, thank you.

Time permitting, despite Jeff's most reasonable opprobrium, I'll try the same populist, crowd-sourced definition from French sources. If anything I'd expect the results to be even more lopsided, but we'll see. In partial defense of the anglo list, there are some reasonably "respected" names in there, like Jancis and Jamie Goode. As Jonathan always reminds us, usage is king, so this was a modest attempt to demonstrate predominant usage, albeit in one language only. And predominant does not mean better, or more eloquent, as Keith's quotes demonstrate.

Jonathan, the two-word alternative doesn't carry the accumulated rhetorical weight of the one-word alternative, but I will adopt it if I have to (but maybe I won't need to).

Rahsaan, my take was not so much that the grapes were being ignored, but that they were being seen as predominantly vehicular. As you well know, one never used to see the words Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in Burgundian labels because they wanted to emphasize the terroirs. Grape names started appearing on new world labels because the new world was perceived as not having any terroir to boast of. Come to think of it, this definition of terroir - that says that the new world doesn't have any - is perfectly consistent with Keith's quotes. But those who say that terroir can exist anywhere would be using the narrower definition.

Jeff, interesting that the appellation system is frequently said to be based on the idea of terroir, and your fourth link points out that they are also based on winemaking practices, suggesting that these are part of terroir. As I see it, the fact that, say, carbonic is traditional in Beaujolais means that the AOC will only endorse carbonic Gamays, when a non-carbonic Gamay from Morgon might actually be more expressive of the (restricted definition) terroir than a carbonic Gamay simply because carbonic tends to homogenize results (though this could be a user illusion). If so, the AOC concept is clearly more interested in promoting the established cultural esthetics, that include man prominently, rather than the soil/climate expression as a stand-alone package. Typicity is really what the AOC is concerned with, and soil and climate are only a part of that.

Keith, great quotes, elegant arguments for the inclusion of man.

Ken, I don't think anyone is suggesting that terroir, even in the restricted definition, can exist independent of man. Somebody has to tend the vines and pick the grapes, etc., which is why I wrote "a definition of terroir that excluded what people do to grapes after they are picked." Even though pruning for yield management might be considered a kind of intervention.

I will accept vox populi (what alternative, vox expertii?), but I'd like to clarify, at the risk of over-exposure, that my underlying reason for preferring the restricted definition is my partisanship of the natural wine ideal: suppose that grapes picked from a chemical-free vineyard at, say, organoleptic maturity (the point where grapes stop accumulating sugar through photosynthesis and start accumulating sugar through concentration; man has to measure and decide) are placed in a neutral tank and left to ferment on their yeasts until the fermentation stops. The juice is then placed (by man) in neutral containers and, after malo happens (or not), it is bottled (by man) and sold (by man), unfiltered, unfined, and unsulfured. The result may be good or bad, but it will be the most minimally interfered result of how that grape expressed itself in that soil and climate during that vintage. Anything man does to alter this result, even if it makes the wine tastier, would be a lessening of the restricted definition of terroir, which would be the ideal that a natural wine means to express.

Of course, this is a bit of a straw horse; most natural wines have much more decision-making going on. But I wonder, when it's said that good winemaker makes good wine in every vintage, are people talking about competent decision-making or competent intervention/correction? The ultimate definition of natural wine might be "nothing added, nothing subtracted," yet that still allows for plenty of competent decision-making, but not competent intervention/correction, or even the use of non-neutral oak.
 
"Jonathan, the two-word alternative doesn't carry the accumulated rhetorical weight of the one-word alternative, but I will adopt it if I have to (but maybe I won't need to)."

I've said this before. I'll say it one more time and then let it drop. The rhetorical weight you want comes precisely from the usage you object to. We have taken a French word with a particular meaning and mystique (for good or ill). If you eliminate the meaning, you don't have the right to the mystique or the rhetorical weight. If you want to use a term to support your belief in natural wine, really you should use stripped down "natural" language. Otherwise you are eating your cake and then trying to have it too. The results aren't pretty. If usage floats to where you want it, the rhetorical weight will soon float away any way. Just try addressing someone as "thou" in English and see where it gets you.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Just try addressing someone as "thou" in English and see where it gets you.
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If you apply a little art to that -- "How art thou?" -- most people will smile and answer.
 
You insist that the word has a particular meaning, and you are the arbiter of that meaning, so you really should let it drop, because that is no argument at all.
 
So, I did a similar random search in French sites and the results were closer to Jonathan's meaning.

Nine sites were biased towards "land and climate," one was ambiguous, and ten insisted on the inclusion of man.

There is no generally accepted meaning, so terroir cannot be said to mean one thing or the other.

Pro land:
http://www.oenologie.fr/vigne/terroirs/terroir_def.shtml (says man plays an important role, but excludes him from the initial definition)

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www.larousse.fr

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fr.wikipedia.org

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www.labivin.net

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www.terroirs-france.com

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www.opusvins.com

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www.cnrtl.fr

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pinotbleu.com

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www.etatsdesplendeur.com

Ambiguous:
https://www.vinotrip.com/fr/blog/terroir-viticole-definition/ (quotes the Larousse definition, seems focused on soil and climate, but says that terroir also encompasses similar production techniques.

Pro man:
http://dictionnaire.sensagent.leparisien.fr/terroir/fr-fr/ (région rurale ayant son caractère culturel propre)
https://vertigo.revues.org/14807 (also stresses the cultural)

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www.vinsvignesvignerons.com
https://www.vinparleur.net/La-nouvelle-definition-du-Terroir?lang=fr \

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dico-du-vin.com

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oenosphere.over-blog.com

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www.la-croix.com

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geoconfluences.ens-lyon.fr

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agrimaroc.net

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www.academievin.org

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www.etatsdesplendeur.com
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
You insist that the word has a particular meaning, and you are the arbiter of that meaning, so you really should let it drop, because that is no argument at all.
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No, I'm not the arbiter of meaning. The French dictionary is. I'm also not the arbiter of rhetorical weight. The history of the word is. You can change the meaning, but you can't change the history and you will loose the weight. Which is probably for the best because the larger ideology (and I use this word here in its original, bland, sense of idea system) behind natural wine really should eschew rhetoric as oaking language.
 
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