There have been
many books written about wine, but very few written about terroir. The research
that does exist on terroir is multifaceted, and the conclusions are often at
odds. Writings on terroir range from scientific arguments over its existence,
to philosophical discussions of its epistemology, historical accounts of its etymology,
and to prosaic pieces by oenophiles and popular wine writers. In his new book Inventing Wine, Paul Lukacs traces
wine’s evolution from prehistory to the present. He traces contemporary scholarship
of wine’s geographical and economic history, but focus primarily on the
cultural changes manifested in wine, and how it has been historically perceived—its
style, and its place in society. Lukacs’s exploration of the cultural evolution
of wine is in many ways a history of terroir. In his introduction, Lukacs
writes that terroir “is ultimately something invented by humans as well as
discovered by them” (xiii), and can
be improved through diligence and craft.
The
winemaking process has changed dramatically over roughly 8,000 years, and
Lukacs reminds us that ancient wine tasted very different from the wines we
experience today. From Neolithic times until the end of the Roman Empire, wine was
recognized as a divine substance, and the psychotropic affects were considered
to be of divine origin. The rise of Medieval Christianity sought to identify
and differentiate the sacred from the secular. Sacramental wine became
differentiated from the ‘sour wine’ consumed daily as a source of nourishment.
This dramatically changed wine’s cultural role, removing it from its
traditional place as something sacred, and relegating it to the domain of ordinary
foodstuffs.
By the late Middle
Ages, wine was in ever greater demand, largely due to a growing merchant class.
Lukacs writes that by this time, “Consumers tended to identify wines neither by
grape variety nor by grape-growing locale, but rather by their place of
transport. […] There was no aging or cellaring of the wines, the goal being to
sell, and drink them as quickly as possible” (p. 58). But as wine’s popularity
grew, consumers were confronted with more choices, and began to look for wines
with distinctive character. Slowly, location and the particular varietal
planted in that location began to matter. By the Renaissance, access to wine was
widespread, and consumers began to discriminate between high-quality wine and
low-quality wine.
A huge gap
developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between the new fine wines
drunk by the upper class, and the old-fashioned sour wines drunk by the poor. At
that time, most wines lasted only a year at best before oxygenation inevitably
led to a decline in quality. The Enlightenment marked wine’s modernization.
More care was given to the entire winemaking process, from vineyard management
to cellar practices. Casks and barrels were topped off to keep them as full as
possible to slow oxidation of the wine, and perhaps most importantly, “the
advent of bottles and corks allowed wines to taste good for surprising lengths
of time” (p. 97). Improvements in storage meant that the most distinguished
wines could be identified not only by place, but also by vintage. As more
people came to drink fine wine, its appreciation gradually became a sign of
sophistication and urbanity.
Wine’s renewed
association with social statues was achieved by way of an important cultural shift.
As producers became more attuned to their craft, consumers became more
discriminating between wines of different quality. The notion of taste expanded
from something purely sensory to a concept that also included intellectual
reflection. Wine’s golden age during the mid-nineteenth-century was a result of
a renewed recognition of wine’s cultural value as well as its improved physical
quality. The notion of taste as a concept or value, an aesthetic measurement
rather than a purely physical sensation, emerged with the Enlightenment. Voltaire,
in one of his contributions to the voluminous Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and d’Alembert in the mid 1700s wrote,
“In all known languages, this sense, this capacity for discriminating between
different foods, has given rise to … the word ‘taste’ to designate the
discernment of beauty and flaws in all the arts. It discriminates as quickly as
the tongue and the palate, and like physical taste it anticipates thought.”
The
greatest minds of the eighteenth-century were obsessed with the concept of
taste, and their obsession led to the emergence of aesthetics as a new
philosophical field of study. The name was derived from the ancient Greek aestheta, which meant, “things perceived,”
and was coined in the 1730s when philosophers began to associate artistic
beauty with expressions of taste (pp. 131-132). In this light, terroir was part
of an aesthetic evolution that emerged during the Enlightenment, and was a
reflection of changing social and philosophical views.
In the
nineteenth-century, consumers considered wines to be of superior quality if
each vintage tasted good. Consistency was valued because it enabled consumers
to recognize particular wines, and assured them of high-quality products. Lukacs
is clear: “The final stage in wine’s nineteenth-century modernization involved
a new conception of what defined or constituted quality. For thousands of years
it had been understood simply to mean an absence of defects or flaws. Then it
had come to signify the presence of distinction or particularity, even if rare
and fleeting. But now it meant something more—a particularity that could be
recognized beyond the immediacy of the present moment, a distinction that
endured” (p. 166). Under this scrutiny two dialectical notions of what defined
a particularly fine wine emerged: a uniformity across vintages, and an
individuality specific to a particular place.
Today, terroir is often
in direct opposition to consistency. When the concept of terroir emerged in the
1900s, it was tied to both a constant singularity and a sense of individuality—the
two means by which consumers might distinguish a wine. After WWII, terroir
became a central component of a wine’s identity. The creation of the French appelatioin
d’origine controlée (AOC) helped consumers identify the particular taste of a
region’s wines, and helped institutionalize terroir as an integral aspect of
French viniculture. Lukacs is astute to point out that the institutionalization
of the AOC brought to light “the realization, first arrived at a century
before, that wine traditions can be invented as well as inherited” (p. 214).
The most
significant advance in modern winemaking, after the use of corks and glass
bottles, was the invention of equipment to regulate temperature. “Temperature
control has had a profound effect not only on how modern wine is made but also
on where it can be made—or more accurately, where high-quality fine wine can be
made. More than any other technical innovation, it has enabled vintners working
in warm or even hot climates to produce distinctive-tasting dry wines” (p. 227).
With these improvements in the field and in the cellar, the gap between vins fin and vins ordinaires began to narrow significantly.
Advances in
winemaking quickly spread across the globe. “The new generation of American,
Australian, and other New World vintners exemplified by Max Schubert did not
accept the emphasis their European compatriots placed on terroir and tradition.
Instead, they stressed the significance of winemaking vision and varietal
integrity, in the process significantly expanding the range of wines available
to consumers the world over” (p 240). These winemakers, unconstrained by
tradition, and driven by modernization, found inspiration in the fruit rather
than the field. “Put another way, the fruit, not the land, was key” (p. 241). This
explains why so many New World wines are single varietal blends, rather than
single-vineyard vintages. Expressing the characteristics of a specific location
was not as important as the flavors that a particular type of grape might
produce.
This style of
production led to a new cultural perception in which consumers came to identify
wine and their preferences in terms of grape varietal. The corporatization of
wine took off in the 1980s, and big-name brands such as Nottage Hill and
Jacob’s Creek sought to appeal to consumers by producing vintages that tasted
consistent year after year, wines that were familiar and reassuring rather than
new and unique (p. 252-3). Lukacs rightly explains, “While these branded wines
lacked the complex particularities of aroma and flavor that provided the best
wines with individuality, they in no sense lacked quality. After all they were
balanced, as well as satisfactorily deep and long. Given the influence of oak,
they even tasted somewhat multidimensional” (p. 254).
One result of wine’s
globalization is a projected idea about how a wine should taste even before it
is made. Often, these ideas are the result of focus groups used by large
wine-producing companies. They have found that consumers prefer wines that taste
consistent each vintage, and this desire for uniformity frequently supersedes terroir
as the desired expression of a wine’s identity. “The only question worth
asking, then, is whether these technical improvements have lessened differences
too much—or to put it another way, whether too many wines being made these days
taste the same” (p. 288). This question is at the heart of the argument made by
those ‘terroirists’ who advocate that a sense of place is crucial for a wine of
high-quality and aesthetic value.
Lukacs delineates
the evolution of terroir from its origins in the early Renaissance, to its
modern incarnation in the 1900s as representing the entirety of the
vineyard—the geology, soil type, topography, climate, etc. Today, terroir has
expanded to encompass the geographical and cultural attributes of a wine specific
to a particular place. Defining terroir further, Lukacs writes, “As something
smelled and tasted, terroir has a mental as well as a physical aspect. When applied
to wine, the word means more than just locale. It designates the human
recognition of locale and so indicates both what may make a wine from one place
taste unlike a wine from another place, and what helps that first wine taste
like itself. Put another way, vin fin, unlike vin ordinaire, needs to be
self-referential. That is, it has to taste as previous renditions indicate it
should taste, meaning above all that it must be true to its origins. A taste,
or gout de terroir, thus invariable
recognizes particularity as a necessary aspect of quality, one understood to be
a property of the wine itself” (pp. 69-70). This winemaking philosophy, with
terroir at its core, has in recent years been relegated to the realm of small,
artisanal producers.
Lukacs claims that
specialized producers, those wineries that give particular attention to
terroir, are still widely accessible. “Globalization has not eradicated
specialized wine production. In fact, specialization and globalization go hand
in hand, the one being the flip side of the other’s coin. That’s because both
fill the void left by what actually is being eradicated, truly bad and spoiled
wine” (p. 299). While I agree that truly bad wines are disappearing, I do think
that the dominant trend is toward wines that meet the needs of our fast-paced
world, wines that are instantly gratifying, that don’t require cellaring or
metaphysical ponderings about place. Wines today compete with the glamour of
cocktails by boasting big flavor and high levels of alcohol.
The invention of corks
allowed wine to age for years in the bottle. Today, corks compete with screw
tops, which prevent any oxidation, and keep wine bright and fresh. Once again,
wine production has brought us to a crossroad of cultural preferences, and the
globalization of the wine industry has led to a change in our collective taste.
For the first time since the introduction of cork bottling, consumers again desire
wine made to be drunk right away. These wines are produced with a desire for
uniformity, a quality once in harmony with that of terroir, but increasingly
one that dominates any sense of place these wines might contain. This
philosophy, which values consistency above individuality, has become
antagonistic to the philosophy of winemakers who value the terroir of a
vineyard.
The absence of
terroir reveals ambivalence about producing wine at its greatest potential, and
settling instead for consistent, well-made wines that invariably taste the
same. Modern technology has made it so any vintner should be able to produce
good wine consistently. This progress in the manufacture of fine wine leaves
terroir as the ultimate expression of uniqueness in a wine today. 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” (p. 4). Terroir, as something expressed by a wine, captures
our perception of these elements, and reflects the uniqueness of the vineyard where
the grapes grew, and how the wine was made. Each vineyard has the potential to
express itself, but to do so properly requires extensive knowledge of which
varietal clone should be grown there, on which rootstock, the optimal pruning
techniques to use, and much more.
The largest wine
producers mix fruit from many vineyards in enormous stainless steel tanks and dilute
any terroir in the grape juice until the content of every bottle is identical.
There can be no sense of place in these wines. Wines without any character
can’t trick our senses, can’t transport us to another time or place. Terroir
relates our sensory attributes of wine to a story—where the grapes where grown,
the weather that year, the beliefs of the vintner—one that elucidates the
partnership between the vintner and the land. When we sense terroir in a wine,
we enter into that partnership.
