This past summer I met my friend Stephen Kessler at Soif, a wine bar in downtown Santa Cruz. Stephen’s a writer and a lover of fine Riojas, and I told him about my wine blog. A couple of days later he sent me an essay he’d written years earlier, titled “Terroirisme, or Proust at the Wine Bar.” Marcel Proust was the first person to use the term “involuntary memory” to describe how sensations can pull past memories unexpectedly into the present. To borrow Proust’s term, a wine with terroir is one that induces an involuntary memory of its origin. Proust believed that involuntary memories contain the essence of the past, just as a wine’s terroir contains the essence of its own past—of the winemaker’s traditions, vineyard geography and the grape varietal.
I find myself returning to that essay, thinking about how wine and memory are linked by our senses, and I want to discern how we recognize terroir in a wine. Much of a wine’s terroir is geological in nature, relating to soil and mineral composition, but any sense of place takes place in the brain. Jamie Good, author of The Science of Wine: From Vine to Glass, on his blog Wineanorak, writes, “Our conscious perception of flavour is formed in the brain. In the interaction between us and the wine we taste, the impression we form is a conscious experience that involves the fusion of inputs from at least four different senses, coupled with some sophisticated brain processing.” That process is memory.
This past December I spent a few days in New York, and while waiting for a friend to get off work and meet up for a glass at Terroir Wine Bar in the East Village, I decided to spend my free afternoon at the Natural History Museum. I was delighted when I arrived to discover that one of the special exhibits, which runs until August, was “Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture.” One of the most fascinating displays was labeled “Food for Thought,” which included a map of the brain with different regions labeled according to their role in sensory perception. Next to the image was a short text: “Why do certain foods summon deep emotional memories? The outer layer of your brain, the cortex, has specialized areas for making sense of tastes and scents and merging them into flavors. But your smell system also has strong links to deeper brain regions that create emotions and memories—one reason foods can have such powerful emotional resonance.” Like Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea, a wine with terroir has the power to overwhelm our senses and transport us through our memories to another place and time.
When we encounter a great wine, it pulls us into our sensory awareness, and at the same time connects us with others, past events and different places. By pulling us into ourselves, wine is capable of rejecting linear time in favor of singular moments, of free mental association rather than a temporal progression. Wine that does this revolts against the passing of time, and forces a release of ego in favor of sensory reflection. Such a wine connects us to others, to those tasters who have also recognized that particular wine’s terroir. Some novels, such as Ulysses by James Joyce, or Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, are so stylized that the authorial presence is forced into the reader’s awareness. A fine vin de terroir force a recognition of the winemaker and the vineyard upon the drinker, inviting the drinker to join in the communication already underway between vintner and vine.
Taste is subjective, determined by cultural evolution and subjective preference. Terroir is an expression of a distinct relationship between the many elements of the vineyard, and those who have worked the land and made the wine. It is also a reflection of the cultural traditions that have evolved to refine winemaking in a particular region. When we recognize terroir in a wine, we recognize a place. But is it necessary that we have some sense of this place, even on a rudimentary level, to sense terroir? In “The Phenomenology of Terroir: A Meditation,” Randall Grahm, winemaker and owner of Bonny Doon Vineyards, writes: “The terroir intelligence does not entirely repose in the site itself, of course, but within the relationship that exists between the land and those who have farmed that land over generations. It is through experience, observation and countless iteration that some very clever person or persons determined that a very particular grape variety or individual genotype thereof on a particular rootstock on a particular soil type produced a wine that had a unique, special quality.” But what exactly is this “special quality,” and how do we recognize it? It seems to me that the greatest difference between professional sommeliers and novice tasters, is that sommeliers have tasted wine from all over the globe. In The Psychology of Wine: Truth and Beauty by the Glass, Evan Mitchell and Brian Mitchell write, “Experiments have suggested that it is not so much greater acuity of smell and taste that distinguishes experienced wine tasters from novices, but their greater range of experience and broader flavor vocabulary.” Expert tasters not only have an array of experiences to help codify a new wine, they also possess the proper language for describing what they’ve experienced.
Our sensory memories affect not only how we perceive a wine, but also how we describe it. The Mitchells write that wine can be described in five dimensions: in terms of flavor, metaphor, geometry, gender, and anthropomorphizing. I would suggest that the last two dimensions are subsets of metaphor, which suggests that how we talk about wine is greatly influenced by how we sense it, and by our memory of past experiences. A wine with terroir has the ability to be recognized as region-specific, highlighting the microclimate of its origin, and this recognition is in turn reinforced by cultural and historical traditions that influence aesthetic taste. Recognition of terroir is tied to collective memory, for although terroir is recognized individually, a wine’s terroir must also be able to be sensed by anyone who is willing to look for it, who is passionate about wine, and who listens to what a wine has to say.
Through description, we enter a dialogue where we use our senses—visual, olfactory, kinesthetic, gustatory—to relate to the components of a wine. We describe a wine’s scent from the olfactory sensations it provokes; flavors emerge because of our gustatory senses; our geometric descriptions relate to our kinesthetic approach to a wine’s texture or mouthfeel; and we describe a wine’s color based on our visual experiences.
In “Colors,” Radiolab Producer Tim Howard and linguist Guy Deutscher discuss the story of William Gladstone, the former British Prime Minister, who conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Gladstone was shocked to find that blue was never used; nor does blue appear in the original Hebrew Torah. Deutscher explains that blue is extremely rare in nature, and that cultures do not create a word for a color until they can reliably make it; red is the easiest, and blue is the hardest color to create. Deutscher goes on to state that black and white are inherent to all languages, and that as languages develop words for new colors, red is always next, then usually green, then yellow; blue is always last. Deutscher explains that Homer came up with his “wine-dark sea” because the word ‘blue’ had not yet been invented. He goes on to explain that when we use color as a descriptive, we connect to a transcending reality. Having a word for ‘blue’ makes us notice blue objects more. It brings blue more fully into our awareness.
We don’t create words until we need them, and each newly formed word actualizes the object named. Our impression of a wine is influenced by our senses, but also by our experience, knowledge and expectations. In “The Phenomenology of Terroir: A Meditation,” Randall Grahm writes: “Matt Kramer once very poetically defined terroir as ‘somewhereness’, and this I think is the nub of the issue. I believe that ‘somewhereness’ is absolutely linked to beauty, that beauty reposes in the particulars; we love and admire individuals in a way that we can never love classes of people or things. Beauty must relate to some sort of internal harmony; the harmony of a great terroir derives, I believe, from the exchange of information between the vine-plant and its milieu over generations.”
Terroir is as much an expression of culture as it is a reflection of place. It is an expression of a collective taste for a particular style of wine born of tradition. Robert Haas, in his 2008 post “Terroir, Then and Now” on the Tablas Creek Vineyard blog, writes: “In the beginning, Egyptian, Greek and Roman wines were always identified by place of origin.” Lacking the traditions of European winemakers, New World vintners, instead of focusing on the “somewhereness” of a wine’s origin, have focused on the “somethingness” of the grape varietals. New World wines are named according to the grape, while Old World wines focus on the location. This focus on varietal rather than vineyard implies that the New World has terroir, but that it hasn’t yet been established as a cultural vernacular.
Elaborating on the sense of place expressed by wine, Randall Grahm continues, “a great terroir wine will provoke a feeling that I can only describe as akin to homesickness, whether or not it is for home that may only exist in your imagination.” Homesickness is a translation of the word nostalgia, and in the late 1600s was considered a medical condition. Svetlana Boym, in her book The Future of Nostalgia, writes, “Nostalgia (from nostos—return home, and algia—longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” Nostalgia can fill our heads with mirages, and create a sense of grandeur about both our past and our present. Boym informs us that “Nostalgia is not always about the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective. Fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future.” In our case, each vintage is a past fantasy of the vintner, determined by the needs of the consumer, which will impact the consumer’s perception of other wines in the future. With terroir, you sense the depth of a wine.
In his foreword to Terroir, by James E. Wilson, Hugh Johnson writes, “Terroir, of course, means more than what goes on below the surface. Properly understood, it means the whole ecology of a vineyard: every aspect of its surroundings, from bedrock to late frosts and autumn mists, not excluding the way the vineyard is tended, not even the soul of the vigneron.” Each vineyard that has been properly planted with the optimal varietal clone, grafted onto the right rootstock, pruned using the optimal techniques, and much more, has the potential to express itself in terroir. But there is also a second terroir, beyond the vineyard, one that starts in the glass and ends in our heads.
