How to Understand Wine
How to Understand Wine: An Industry’s Love Affair With Terroir
Is it really as important as we’re told?
As long as I’ve been tasting, researching, collecting and exporting wines, I have heard the word terroir at least once a day. It’s a prevalent concept throughout the wine industry, and sometimes seems designed to baffle the consumer. But where did the idea come from and what is it?
What is terroir?
Wine is often held as a product of its place, above all else. The classic idea of terroir is something specific to a place or area which acts to change the base flavours of wine in some way. That’s why a vin de table from Bordeaux will often trade at a premium to artisan wines from Georgia or Romania. The Oxford English Dictionary also plays into this idea, defining terroir as below:
The characteristic taste and flavour imparted to a wine by the environment in which it is produced
In a sense, this is true. Wine is, indeed, a product of and greatly affected by its sense of place. But why? The most common ingredients, then, making up terroir are commonly said to be geology and climate. The definition of terroir may also extend to native yeasts, traditional farming techniques like pruning styles and fertilizers, moon cycles and even the composition of cellar walls…there are many other factors at play which change taste (and our perceptions of it).
Stone Age Drinking…
To understand when terroir became important, we have to delve back into the very history of wine itself. Wine is widely regarded as having come into being spontaneously sometime during the Neolithic period (8,000–3,000BC). Grapes occurring naturally in the wild were grown as vines up tree-trunks in lieu of the trellises commonly used today. When ripe, grapes were stored in barrels or clay amphora-like kvevri to eat later. Over time, the pressure of the grapes above crushed those below, releasing sugar juices which combined with the naturally-occurring yeasts on the skins, accidentally fermenting over time to make an alcoholic mixture. Proof of this has been found in the remains of ancient clay pots throughout Georgia in Eastern Europe.
It was also in Georgia that vines became domesticated, for in the wild, vines are hermaphrodite and able to pollinate themselves from one stem. By training vines into genders, man was able to increase the yield of crops over time.
From Georgia, wine became an integral part of human history: the yeasts on the skins were re-used to make beers and breads, creating whole worlds of cuisine that today have removed themselves from their grapely origins through advances in artificial yeast technologies. Noah disembarking from the Ark at Mount Ararat planted grapes in the aftermath of the Flood in the Bible’s book of Genesis, drinking the resulting wine.
The first signs that terroir was becoming prevalent and that winemaking was evolving from a potluck attempt at fermentation into something like a science can be seen in the grave of the boy-king Tutankhamen. Tutankhamen was buried with hundreds of bottles, each stamped with the year of production and region of production, a clear acknowledgement of the terroir that goes into each bottle.
…and the Romans drank honeyed wine
This idea continued, and by the time of the Romans a wine called Falernian was highly prized. Falernian was a yellow wine, highly sweetened by the additions of honey and water. It was an ancient equivalent of the modern Sauternes style, and was detailed by Columella, Galen and Virgil as the most desirable wine of the time. It was produced on the border of Latium and Campania to the east of Rome but it is debatable whether the wine was prized because of its terroir or because the amount of honey in the wine made it drinkable and less likely to go off.
In many ways, it was the Burgundian monks who first fully embraced the idea of modern terroir. The primarily Cistercian monks owned vast vineyards throughout Burgundy, and began to split these vineyards up into different cru boundaries. This can be witnessed even today at estates such as Clos de Vougeot and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (“DRC”).
In 1714, terroir first appeared as a term in its own right, with the Count d’Olonne claiming in 1714 that heat removes the “goût de terroi”, or “taste of the soil” from wines. Later, the term entered the vernacular of critics, and Tovey labelled a wine “ce vin sent le terroir”, or “this wine smells of the terroir”.
The Soil
However, if you are anything like me you may still be wondering — well, what is it? What exactly is flowing into these grapes which you cannot get elsewhere? After all, the only things a climate and soil are imparting to the wine will only be a select collection of different minerals that one could artificially add as part of the winemaking process. In thinking that wine cannot possibly absorb a large chunk of its surroundings, you would be entirely correct.
In fact, research has shown that less than 0.2% of a typical wine consists of inorganic matter such as minerals, compounded by the difficulty that vine roots cannot absorb solid particles from the ground. This means that any minerals carried up into the grapes which are specific to a terroir must be absorbed into any soil water first, ruling out many compounds naturally occurring in the soil such as slate. And the minerals that do get dissolved are picked up by every plant which feeds on groundwater, not just vines, such as olives.
In order to encourage vines to pick up more minerals and fully represent the terroir, farmers will purposely starve vines of water in the topsoil and plant on barren rocks (such as limestone in Burgundy and gravel and clay in Bordeaux, all of which allow rainwater to quickly run through the topsoil deep into the earth). This forces the vines’ roots to spread out further downwards, increasing the number of minerals they might pick up.
However, this 0.2% quantity of wine being inorganic minerals is difficult to explain away. Most of this 0.2% is made up of NaCl — sodium chloride, or common table salt. And this does have a taste, of course. It’s just not that taste of distinctive rocks and hillsides that most people would associate with the terroir of a specific place or year.
The Climate
A reasonable reader may ask at this point: if the soil and geology of a place has seemingly little impact on the taste, what about the climate? Does the wind shaking the grapes, sloshing the maturing juices inside and the sun shining down, ripening the fruit not have any effect either?
Well, it does. You see, there is a chemical process at play with weather which has more of a quantifiable impact on a wine’s taste than the soil, mostly depending (as many chemical reactions do) on heat. This starts from veraison, a French term denoting the onset of the ripening process. Generally, the hotter and sunnier a year is, the faster fruit ripens, a universally-acknowledged truth for most farmers.
When grapes ripen, something magical happens. Anthocynanins, which form the red colours in red grape skins, form. But the primary ripening process important to wine is the transformation of acids inside the grape into sugars. It is these sugars which will transform into alcohol through fermentation, and the balance of alcohol, acid and sugar which plays most heavily on the palate of drinkers.
A practice which involves doping wines with sugar is called chaptalization. Chaptalization is named after Jean-Antoine-Claude Chaptal, the comte de Chanteloup who also served as Napoleon’s Minister for Internal Affairs, and clarified the grape-sugar relationship.
Nowadays, in tightly-regulated areas such as Bordeaux, where cool years result in poor sugar levels, illicit sugar trucks roam after dark, dropping sugar off at vineyards to top up levels to ensure a proper fermentation can take place. In recent years, this has led to criminal cases bought by the state against prominent vineyards.
It’s not just sugar, either: over the years, adulterations of ripening have been attempted, often involving calcium carbide or (for unscrupulous farmers who care little for poisoning others) ethylene are sometimes used to speed up the ripening process.
But after all, many of the processes happen everywhere: most places will see some sun and some rain, maybe not to exactly the same degree — but one could reasonably expect neighbouring plots at the same vineyard to have very similar weather patterns.
Terroir: The Myth
So then: what really is terroir and why is it important? For there is something making every wine taste different — rarely do two wines taste the same. But maybe that’s not the full story, and surely weather and the soil can’t be the only explanation for the differences…
The problem is that nobody really knows, but that ultimately “terroir” is being utilised by many winemakers to cover up a vast array of processes that have a greater impact on taste down in the cellar.
This problem isn’t helped by the general tendencies of winemakers to espouse their terroir as the true genius behind their wines. There are several reasons to lay credit with the soil and the air instead of any of the various potions and torture devices which lie in the cellar. I believe that the reasons below (unfortunately) offer the key to why terroir instead of skill in the cellar is promoted above all else.
Why is Terroir Promoted?
- Terroir is specific to your plot alone: if your terroir is magical, no-one else can replicate it through finings, filtrations, toasting or funky yeasts. You will have a clear USP — and an economic advantage over farmers on nearby plots
- Terroir distracts from the grunt going on in the cellar, better promoting that all-natural image of winemaking as a simple, honest collaboration between man and nature. This is marketable and taps into the desire for a cleaner, more honest way of living
- And the most cynical of all: terroir is a way to mitigate economic uncertainty. If you are hit by incessant frosts, hailstorms or roasting temperatures, it can be tempting to announce that a year of low yields caused by unfavourable weather has also resulted in a small but supposedly highly promising crop of grapes…and as such you can charge exorbitant prices for each bottle!
I mean, the above list is a tad cynical. In reality, something makes wine taste different each and every time…but it’s unlikely the tiny shifts in minerals afforded by the soil, or the acidic balance from the sun and heat is what shifts the taste of wine the most. Instead, we must place the blame at the hidden secret of winemaking: the cellar.
