The raison d’être — that’s what I’m looking for. Forty years of working with wine brings a lot of lessons. Like most in the U.S., I tried to deconstruct the stuff. Learn about grape varieties. Learn about barrels and tanks. Learn about “winemaking.” Learn about “brands.” Then…

Unlearn everything — it’s all meaningless without understanding culture and history. Wine has played a central role in the evolution of Western civilization for thousands of years. Long before there was a “Germany,” or “Italy,” or “France” as we know them today, there was wine. No one knows which paleolithic human first discovered fermenting grapes growing wild and no one knows (definitively) which culture first “made” wine — it’s just been there. Why?

Well, aside from the fascination humans have with a “buzz,” wine provided sustenance — something to drink that wouldn’t kill you (drinking water in isolated, primitive agricultural communities that knew little of the relationship between human waste and disease routinely poisoned their water supplies), and it was a source of calories (not that anyone in such communities knew anything about “calories”).

Agriculture (only being practiced by humans for some 9,000 years) is often a crapshoot. One is at the mercy of latitude, climate, hours of sunlight, soil conditions, elevation — a host of challenges. But agriculture made possible a host of benefits as well. No longer were humans bound to hunter-gatherer status. We could grow and nurture plants & animals to eat. We could “settle down,” establish “community,” and engage in trade. We could “become” human.

Humans, like most mammals, drink when (or shortly after) they eat to lubricate their mouths and push food to the digestive system. Our agricultural choices dictated what we could eat (the raw beginnings of “local cuisines,” if you will). The grape vines humans learned to cultivate gave a (relatively) safe drinking supply, and had the benefit of growing in soils that couldn’t support other crops (the species of vine; vitis vinifera, which produces every grape you’ve likely heard of, does best in rocky, well-drained, less fertile soils). Over time isolated agricultural communities would begin selecting grape varieties which made wines that (more or less) “tasted good” with available food sources.

Voilà! (pardon me) — how “regional” wines evolve. And it explains why the Rhône is different from Burgundy or Bordeaux. Foods are different (though France seems to become less French each time I visit), local histories and culture are different. One’s not “better” than the other — just different.

In many of these regions, trade in wine began to shape preferences and habits. Areas later incorporated into France and Germany benefitted most from this trade, particularly in those areas where the church farmed most of the best sites for growing wine. What did the church have to do with it?

“..none but the ignorant or men of bad faith are capable of denying the merited praises which the sons of St. Benedict have received for their agricultural labours throughout Europe…” —Leopold Janauschek: “Originum Cisterciensium Liber Primus” (Vienna, 1877)

To take the most obvious example — Burgundy, the Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries which ranged from Dijon in the north to Cluny in the south farmed almost every well-situated vineyard site for nearly 800 years. The monks were meticulous keepers of records (these monasteries were among the few places where literacy and scholarship was valued), and came to recognize that, all things being equal (same grapes — same farming), individual parcels of vineyard land produced wines distinct and different than adjacent vineyard parcels. And they found that some grapes were superior to others (within the confines of their geography) at displaying these differences than others. Thus are born the concept of terroir* and noble grape varieties.

These monasteries with their considerable economic and political influence helped to shape the trade in wine, and therefore preferences, influencing wine producers throughout (what became) France.

Trade adds the thought that some wine is “better” than others. Trade shows both the stregnth and weaknesses of the hundreds of wine regions, forcing change and pushing quality to higher standards.

So we have agriculture and trade, which leads to distinct cultures, which leads to distinct wines. All of which happen through human activity which evolves over centuries.

Forty years of learning, unlearning, and re-learning about wine (a never-ending process by the way) leads me contend that wine is so much more than “what’s in the bottle” (a familiar trope that assumes that if one “likes” a particular wine it is “good” wine). It also leads me to contend that there are no “bad” regions or grapes. Any particular wine may be good or bad (an entirely different rant), but a good wine will always tell the story of its origins, and the human efforts (often over many centuries) that produced it. and this is the raison d’être I’m looking for in any wine.

*Terroir is often opined upon as being something the French “invented” in order to charge more for their wine. Opinions being like ani (everyone’s got one), are more often than not, ill-informed at best. The literal translation of terroir is “dirt.” This has nothing and everything to do with concept of terroir.

Understanding terroir requires, first, understanding a culture. What sort of agricultural choices were available to the region? What is the climate? In response to those two, what were the grapes nurtured? Where did the wine grow? What are the soil types? How was the wine farmed?

Good, well-farmed wine can express terroir, and not just in an organoleptic sense. There are measurable, empirical data in the wine that relate to its mineral content that “prove” terroir.