As I recall, the accepted wisdom in the 70s was that botrytis didn’t exist naturally on vines in California.
Given I had some downtime, I downloaded Matthews book today and skimmed several sections. Overall, I am enjoying reading it and I found many of his observations interesting. With that said, I think it’s important to note that this not a scientific book but more of an overview of his opinions, thoughts and conclusions based on some science, some history and some of his own thinking. He has many theories that he does not attempt to prove and I think much of his writing is driven by healthy skepticism and a personal desire to gore sacred cows. Also, he struggles to measure wine quality and variously uses critics scores, chemical concentrations etc. It’s not clear to me that any of these are rigorous enough to drive meaningful science.
Looking at some of the sections, I definitely agree with him that the simple “low yields = higher quality” formula is inaccurate and the relationship is far more complex than that. We have conducted many yield trials and the results do not show any simple linear relationship. Meanwhile, Mother Nature’s annual yield trials (ie our widely varying natural yields) do not correlate with the simple relationship either.
I found his terroir section much less interesting. He seems very emotionally inclined to diminish terroir’s role but he does little to prove his point. The following quote was quite illuminating “Unfortunately, the roles of soil mineral nutrition in grape and wine quality are not well studied, although the necessary nutrients for productivity are well known”. If this is the case, why should I believe that current science has anything important to say about the relationship between specific soils and specific wine character?
Kevin, your comments seem consistent to me with what I suspect is the state of scientific understanding about the relationship of soil and wine quality. I have to assume that the vast majority of plant and soil research has all along been aimed at understanding how to grow crops in large quantities, keep plants healthy, and produce quality fruit and vegetation for the mass market. That’s very different from the understanding that is needed to relate soil differences to wine “quality” in the bottle, particularly twenty years down the road after bottling. Even if it’s possible to establish those relationships scientifically (and I’m not sure it is, because “quality” is not something easily measurable, the chemical compounds involved are myriad and in very low concentrations, and the trajectory of soil into wine character and quality has to be extremely contorted and complex), no agency is funding that kind of research.
So, really, Matthews seems to be saying exactly this: we know, broadly speaking, what kinds of soil nutrients and conditions are necessary to grow healthy plants - but we know very little about how the subtle complexities of a particular soil ultimately translate into the subtle flavor complexities in a fine wine. Isn’t that all he’s saying? If it is, then his assertions that there is a lot of myth and hand-waving in the wine growing and producing world is not out of line - where there is no science to back up a claim or belief, there can only be experiential evidence. That experience (as you rightly say) is extremely valuable, particularly in the hands of, say, an old time Burgundy grower who has seen a wide range of soils, vintages, and conditions. But there is also a whole lot of BS circulating the wine world, often accepted as truth or conventional wisdom (and often by people who are very experienced).
All in all, I don’t see a controversy here, and I suspect your take on things is more reasonable than Kramer’s slightly inflammatory essay seems to be.
Alan,
IMO, that’s all he should say but he goes further as I think he emotionally wants to debunk the notion of terroir. He ends the chapter with “As I continued to pull together opinions on terroir, the collection of definitions developed a historical trajectory, but not toward a more coherent understanding of how the grapevine and its environment interact to make a grape. Terroir was transformed from bad to good with no basis in the grapevine, and from a literal soil flavor to a tardy and inconsistent acknowledgment of the aerial environment (by some authors), and then went wobbly with ineffable flavors and shining questions. In the end, terroir is a shibboleth that establishes an in-group in a world unto itself. This isn’t wine appreciation, and it certainly doesn’t reflect interest in the grapevine; it is more like wine snobbery. After investing greatly in trying to sort out what terroir means for grapevines, I suggest following wine writer Paul Lukacs’s advice, and not get hung up on it.”
As you can see this not science.
Well, I’m actually a little sympathetic to what seems to be his underlying theme: that “terroir” is a basket into which much has been thrown, some of which may or may not belong.
I certainly agree with that as far as the definition. I wish we could settle on “soil and climate derived wine character and quality” as that is the most interesting definition to me.
Matthews writings on this are not nearly as evenhanded as it might seem. The quote about the lack of understanding of the roles of soil mineral nutrition in grape and wine quality is quite minor and he doesn’t give this (massive) void much relevance in the discussion. Instead he tries to debunk the concept on a historical and economic basis with just enough plant physiology (though little that is really relevant) to be convincing. At one point he uses the point that vines can grow without soil to somehow intimate that this might prove that soils roil is not that relevant. Meanwhile, he seems somewhat Xenophobic in that he does not use any French research (and very heavily weights Davis’ conclusions) or thoughts on the topic and seems to think the whole thing is an economically driven hoax. He also bolsters his conclusions by bringing up ancient now-debunked old wives tales as if this somehow has relevance on the concept of terroir.
It would be much more interesting to read an article that tries to understand why the Grand Crus are found exclusively on the midslope of the Cote de Nuits. For example the physical properties of the Grand Cru soils are similar to each other and different than the parcels above and below. In general, they are 2-3 ft of topsoil over sedimentary bedrock. Parcels above are more shallow and plots below are deeper. IMO, these properties can have obvious effects on the plants physiology and grape development. When a plant physiologist suspends disbelief (or proves it to themselves through the glass) and assumes that the Grand Crus actually produce better wine, I think the resulting conversation would be much more enlightening. Instead we have a plant physiologist using history and economics to make other arguments.
Makes me wonder how much of this Kramer read, or truly understands. Either way, you’re to be applauded for slogging through his writings and shedding more light here.
And it seems pretty obvious to some of us why the Grand Cru plots produce the best wines, once you accept the principle that the “best” wines grow in places where they are on the knife edge of conditions that allow perfect ripeness in certain years. Add in the influence of soil (grand/premier cru/village), moisture, vine genetics and age, and it’s all pretty simple, really 
Which, Alan, is the point Carole was trying to make upstream, I think. The term “terroir” carries w/ it a lot of baggage that it doesn’t deserve.
It was all a lot simpler when you said “gout de terroir” and everyone knew (pretty much) what you were talking about. Now the magic of
the “terroir” word has been expanded so much that it even includes the hand of the winemaker.
Tom
If the meaning of gout de terroir is ‘taste of the soil’ then this is something that can be measured in some way. If this terms means soil+climate, then we are getting a bit vague. If it means soil+climate+proper winemaking, then we are getting somewhere but we are off the charts as far as science is concerned.
Friends of mine bought chardonnay from a vineyard where they had over cropped and made the wine in big stainless steel tanks. The winery could not sell it in bulk to anybody. The two winemakers thought that if they pruned back and barrel fermented the wine, they might get somewhere. The wine was the first vintages of Au Bon Climat Chardonnay.
I do think the reason a lot of people think the concept of terroir is bunk is that it keeps changing and has no definition, is used by everybody to sell wine. It reminds me of the old sales concept of USP, Unique Sales Proposition…we’ve got the soil and you don’t.
It’s funny that it is the Burgundians who go on and on about terroir, yet it is there where the hand of the winemaker is most important. Otherwise we would just buy wine by appellation. .
Well, terroir is something many regions treasure, from Rhone to Mosel to Austria to Loire, and vineyards/regions in California most definitely have terroir!
Honestly, to argue against terroir is just foolhardy…
I believe that blackboard chalk is made mostly from mineral gypsum (calcium sulfate), not natural chalk which is mostly mineral calcite (calcium carbonate).
Different barrels, sure, those should show differences, but perhaps more interesting would be wines from the same grape variety and same clones but from eight different locations, brought up identically in stainless by the same winemaker, and, to keep him from putting his thumb on the scale in any fashion, who probably shouldn’t know which lot is which.
Alan,
could you define terroir for me?? That way I will know what I am writing about…
Thanks
Frank,
I suppose the real question is what change in the process influences the results the most.
Yes, you could have five or ten teams of people harvesting the different fields at the same time, fermenting the same way…etc…and then you could taste the results and see differences. What a surprise that would be.
At the IPNC they did an experiment where they had three groups of two wineries work with grapes from the same vineyard, bottle the wine etc. We tasted. Hard to believe but the ‘terroir’ group found similarities btwn the lots from the same vineyard and noted the differences btwn wines from different regions. The ‘winemaker’ proponents noticed the differences btwn wines from the same area made by different winemakers.
I once invited a winemaker friend, formerly the winemaker at Mondavi and Simi, to a tasting at a winery in the Healdsburg area. We tasted eight Merlots, aged in different barrels, Hungarian and French. Her comment was that if she had not know better she would have thought they were all different wines.
Alan,
I am not saying there are not wonderful vineyards outside of Burgundy. But it is there, and perhaps in Germany, where people go on and on about terroir and soil types. But if these conditions are so crucial, then why do people pay boatloads of money for Coche and not so much for other wines with the same appellation?? There are lots of examples I could use.
Could it be …the winemaker?? The techniques??
But if these conditions aren’t so crucial, then why do people pay boatloads of money for Meursault and not so much for wines made with Chardonnay in Languedoc? There are lots of examples I could use.
Mel - I did similar tastings with Spanish and Hungarian wines and I felt just like your friend did. Same vineyard, same winemakers - they were just testing out different barrels. I’m sorry I’m going to miss the oak conference next week - I would have loved to attend.
As to Kramer’s article - I was reading it the other morning and grew increasingly irritated. I wasn’t going to post on this thread but what the hell. And BTW, I just ordered Matthews book. It’s 23.99 from Amazon and I’ll read it on the plane next weekend.
I gotta say at the outset that I’m not a fan of Kramer’s, and it’s because of this kind of stuff. He says he’s written about terroir over the years and consequently was quoted in the book. OK, but written what? About the poetry of place?
More importantly, he makes the fundamental mistake many people make when it comes to anything related to “science” - he treats it as a belief system and makes it a tribal discussion. It becomes a religion - you’re either in it or you’re not. A believer or an infidel.
That’s the easy and silly argument. Essentially, “science” is an approach, not a set of core beliefs. You see something. You wonder about it. You try to understand it. In other words, you learn.
So the people who decided years ago to reduce their yields - did they all wake up one day with the revealed wisdom? Of course not. Something happened to reduce production and someone noted that the wine was better. So maybe they tried it again with a few rows of vines and again they liked the result. Kind of like a “scientific” approach as it were. Then that idea spread around and the politicians in the region jumped in front of it and legislated it. And maybe in that region, growing those grapes, using the trellising and vinification techniques of that time, it was logical.
But that’s where we’re supposed to stop? If indeed there is an improvement in quality - not a sure thing by any means, is it wrong to try to understand why that is and how it works?
And as to “science” writers discussing taste - that’s a bullshit argument. Define what is good and then someone can measure the parameters and maybe help get to that point - it’s the business model of Enologix isn’t it? But absent that definition, what can science do? Maybe epidemiological studies - x number of people preferred wine A and y number preferred wine B. Maybe chemical analysis of various wines defined as “good” by Kramer to see if there’s anything in common between them. Or who knows what. But science isn’t about having answers for everything, it’s about finding answers. And riding the surging tide of anti-intellectualism in the US, Kramer once again oohs and ahs at the mysterious forces around us.
I have never heard anyone say that soil is utterly irrelevant in wine production, or in agriculture. But take the same dirt, a mile deep, and put it in 20 different places in the world and the resulting produce will be different. Do you get cold winds blowing directly in off the sea? Are you on a western, northern, or southern slope? Are you hot and dry through most of the year or is there fog as often as not? All of those things matter and all of those things are “terroir”. And to the extent that places like Burgundy, Tokaj, Piedmont and other regions have subregions that produce differing wines - they’re all hilly or even mountainous, not flat like Kansas. So one might ascribe differences to many things that may or may not include soil.
Wanted to come back to this one. In a way, I think your comment here illustrates the problems on both sides - a lot of wine science (as I said earlier) is targeted at larger growing and production of grocery store wines, not fine artisan wine. And I suspect a lot of earlier research conclusions have filtered down into the commonly accepted “scientific wisdom”, just as a lot of conventional wisdom pervades the growing and winemaking side. On the specific point you make about yeast, for example, growers will generally tell you that natural yeast from the exact vineyard is part of the terroir of a wine. While Davis may have put forth the idea that yeast in the vineyard is not a major factor in fermentation. I have seen studies that do indeed conclude that a winery builds up its own “native” yeast, which is mostly responsible for fermentation once grapes arrive. Yes, there are saccharomyces in the vineyard, but in most cases the science seems to suggest they are not the primary drivers of fermentation. I’m curious if you’ve ever done this testing in your vineyards and winery, across multiple years, to draw your own conclusions?
My point is really that there are often tools to answer certain questions very easily, but very few cases where someone has actually expended the time and money to find the answers definitively. Thus, we have the quandry that there is a lot of confusion in all corners.
We usually have multiple fermenters of grapes from a given vineyard. They are generally different when we press them, even in cases with the same size fermenters and the winemaker had treated them the same (they do typically come from slightly different parts of the vineyard). They aren’t radically different, but they are often noticeably different. I’m also not sure how different they would be a year later.
Certain vineyards do seem to impart something to the wines. Back when Dave Corey was managing the Alta Mesa vineyard and selling some fruit to other wineries (Grenache, Mourvedre, Syrah), I could usually pick out an aspect on the palate that was characteristic of the vineyard or area (in blind tastings without knowing an Alta Mesa wine was present). Similarly, wines from grapes on decomposed granite seem to have a common component on the palate.
Besides the composition of the soil (and microclimate, etc.), some people believe that the microbial community in the soil contributes to the way the wine smells and tastes.
-Al
I’m pretty sure there should be a sarcasm emoticon here, but if not let me know and I’ll write some weasel words as an answer
People pay boatloads of money for all kinds of reasons, sometimes because of the perceived “terroir quality” (certainly that places a floor on accepted prices in a few select regions, Burgundy being the most obvious, but others as well around the world - and even in California), sometimes because of hype, scarcity, you name it. And, while soil is a definite component in the end product, obviously many other factors contribute (and some can be stronger influences than the terroir itself), including vine genetics, vine age, climate, moisture availability, winemaking (yeast, stems, barrels, extraction, temperature, etc., etc.).
But if you taste through several wines made by a producer, particularly one with a “soft” winemaking hand, and from a region that is able to express its terroir best (following my earlier “requirement” that the conditions must be such that grapes are around the cusp of viability in an average year), most people should be able to easily detect differences. Line up the wines of Mugnier (an example I pick because he makes wines from several different vineyards, not far from each other so climate is relatively uniform, and has what I consider to be a soft hand in winemaking, not using stems, small doses of new oak for the 1er cru and village wines, and I assume similar winemaking techniques across the board for the different wines). I’d say most people would easily be able to tell the differences between his NSG Marechale, Chambolle-Musigny Les Fuées, and Bonnes Mares. Is it possible the vines/clones/age is so different between those to account for the differences in the wines? Maybe, I don’t have the knowledge of exactly what’s planted there. But given that there is a general commonality between wines from a certain vineyard, across numerous producers, I’m satisfied attributing at least a good fraction of the character of the wines to the soil.
I have my own small experience with this: I have a few vines growing in my Fremont back yard. The soil is hard pack alluvial clay. Real crap. Vines grow just fine, produce decent fruit, but the few times I’ve made wine it is as crappy as the soil. Terroir does exist, and in my little case, I have none ![[wow.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/7/7d450e9830889c8943b674446a21b7254cad657e.gif "wow"){kind=small}