A singular, shining identity. The expression of a particular, unique place on the Earth’s surface—call it terroir—blessed by geological and microclimatic felicities, hallowed by a name rich in historical or at least local associations, through the prism of a noble grape variety.

This ideal notion carries much weight in the world of wine. You might recall Walter Pater’s dictum that “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music” and apply it to this luminous singularity. You can, however, already see that this ideal notion is fraught with complications or even contradictions. It may hold good for the greatest wines of Burgundy, the Mosel, Barolo, or the Loire, but it is clearly more problematic when applied to Bordeaux, Champagne, Rioja, the Douro, or even Napa Valley.

For a start, in those latter regions, varietal wines are the exception rather than the rule. Petrus may be (in recent times) a 100% Merlot wine, but I have yet to encounter a 100% Cabernet Sauvignon wine in Bordeaux, apart from experimental lots shown to me at Léoville-Las-Cases by Michel Delon. Traditionally in Champagne, Rioja, and the Douro, identity has been linked with brand or house style—a very different notion, you might think.

I was reflecting on these matters recently after a dinner showcasing vintages of Yalumba’s top red cuvée, The Caley, named after the horticulturist and adventurer Fred Caley Smith, introduced by winemaker Kevin Glastonbury. This blend of Coonawarra Cabernet (sometimes also Barossa Cabernet) and Barossa (sometimes also Eden Valley) Shiraz is a rebuff to the notion of singular identity. The thinking behind it is that the marriage of these two (sometimes four) very different entities, made from different grape varieties in regions hundreds of miles apart, results in something more satisfying than either on its own.

I’m sympathetic to this thinking, having long felt, a little heretically, that 100% Coonawarra Cabernet can be too much of a good thing, too intensely minty and linear for its own good, and likewise (though with more exceptions, especially Henschke’s marvelous Hill of Grace and Mount Edelstone bottlings) that Barossa Shiraz can be excessively full and voluptuous, or somewhat too sensational, as Canon Chasuble might have put it.

Completeness and harmony were two terms I kept using in my notes on the 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018 vintages of the The Caley. Sometimes, the minty, blackcurranty notes of Coonawarra Cabernet predominated, sometimes the almost caramelly warmth and ripeness of Barossa Shiraz; often the two blended seamlessly into an elegant and satisfying complexity that promised a long, slow unfurling.

Quite bravely, I think, The Caley proposes an identity that is openly and shamelessly multiple. On the whole, the trend for “luxury” bottlings is to aspire to ever greater singularity. One might think in Champagne of Krug’s Clos du Mesnil or Philipponnat’s Clos des Goisses. I remember attending a blending session of base wines chez Krug at which Clos du Mesnil featured, along with a number of other crus. Was it “better” than the others? Hard to say, or rather contingent on whether it was being considered as a cru on its own—a soloist—or as a blending component in a “symphony.”

Identity: Multiple benefits

My thoughts on The Caley were to some extent reinforced at a tasting dedicated to the three single-vineyard Malbecs made, at increasing levels of altitude, by Achaval Ferrer in Mendoza—from Finca Mirador, Finca Bella Vista, and Finca Altamira. They were truly fascinating to compare and contrast, with Altamira having a je ne sais quoi of complexity and salinity that put it just ahead of the others. But when, at the end of the tasting, winemaker Gustavo Rearte showed two examples of Quimera—Achaval Ferrer’s blend of four grape varieties grown in quite widely separate locations—I was captivated by the harmony, subtlety, and extra freshness from Cabernet Franc. Once again, multiple identity had the edge.

By a rather circuitous route, this brings me back to Burgundy. Surely Burgundy is the place where single identity reigns supreme. And within Burgundy, in no context more than the rarefied world of the grands crus—those 33 sites, most identified (even if not officially classified) centuries ago as the most illustrious of them all. They carry names such as Le Montrachet, Romanée-Conti, La Romanée, La Tâche. It was a rare privilege to attend a tasting devoted to one of them—Clos des Lambrays in Morey-St-Denis—presented by the admirably open-to-the-world régisseur of the Domaine des Lambrays, Jacques Devauges.

Unusually, Devauges wanted to take us not just into the engine room of one of Burgundy’s greatest wines, but into the engine itself. Metaphorically donning blue overalls, and getting his hands covered in grease, he disassembled the 2022 vintage of the cru into some of its cuvées parcellaires before showing us the assembled grand cru itself. Clos des Lambrays is 8.66ha (21.4 acres) in extent, which may not sound very much but is, of course, several times as large as Romanée-Conti, and there is a surprising variety of soil types. We were entranced by the violet, floral delicacy of the Plante Bas parcel, fell in love with the shy freshness of Le Cerisier, and then (in my note) found an “even higher degree of loveliness” in the 80 Ouvrées Haut. In the end, though, the assembly of all the 11 parcels in the grand cru had it all: energy, freshness, all manner of fruits and spices, voluptuous mouthfeel… “The final wine is always better than the cuvées parcellaires,” said Devauges, with the conviction born of empirical observation, not theory. 

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Before I get myself into trouble with the title of this column, let me say straightaway that I absolutely believe in terroir based on my experience of tasting wine, but I have never been convinced by any attempt to demonstrate a basis for it. (There might be a career to be made in debunking claims that the effects of terroir on wine have been “proved.”) What I want to consider here is the nature of the gap between subjective experience and the methods that might be used to demonstrate terroir on an objective basis. 

No one who is interested in Burgundy can really doubt the existence of terroir. There are simply too many cases where two adjacent vineyards give consistently different results, even though, so far as we can tell, all variables other than the site are similar. I could fill this whole column with examples from the Côte d’Or, but one will suffice.

Cazetiers and Combe aux Moines are adjacent premiers crus in Gevrey-Chambertin. Combe aux Moines has a cooler exposure because it faces more to the north; Cazetiers extends farther down the slope and so has slightly lower average elevation with deeper soil. That may explain the difference that Combe Aux Moines harvests two days later than Cazetiers. Faiveley’s plots in the two vineyards are adjacent—“The tractor doesn’t stop,” says technical director Jérôme Flous. The vines are tended, and the two wines are vinified, in exactly the same way. Tasting these two wines side by side through a series of vintages shows there is a consistent difference: Cazetiers always has a finer impression, Combe Aux Moines a more foursquare impression. That is what I mean by terroir.

The case for terroir is much less persuasive in Bordeaux, because all wines are blends. It is hard to demonstrate nuances of terroir that persist across vintages when each vintage may have different proportions of the varieties in the blend. And the scale of production is much larger than in Burgundy, so most wines are blends from vineyards as well as varieties, and sometimes the individual plots are quite dispersed, meaning that the wine represents a variety of terroirs.

The strongest claim for distinctive terroir in Bordeaux lies with the famous gravel mounds on the Left Bank. This is a geological term; it has little to do with gravel as used in landscaping. A gravel mound consists of topsoil on compact sand, sitting on top of a gravel bed that can range from a couple of inches (a few centimeters) to 6–9ft (2–3m) in depth. Below that are alternating layers of compact sand and clay lens.

The first growths have prime positions on the gravel mounds, located on deep gravel with a relatively low water table. These favored locations are warmer than the surrounding areas, which might have been an advantage historically but may become a mixed blessing in the era of climate change. The other leading châteaux also mostly lie along the band of gravel, but they have more variation in terroir. With the exception of the first growths, there is not really any geological evidence to support a hierarchy among them, or to distinguish them from other châteaux close by. Claims that terroir has anything to do with the 1855 Classification, for example, are on very thin ground.

Chemistry and individuality

Against this background, it is interesting that a claim to detect the individuality of specific producers should come from Bordeaux. This is based on using gas chromatography to identify the range of volatile molecules in the wines from seven châteaux—four on the Left Bank and three on the Right Bank.¹ (Chromatography is a method of separating compounds because they move at different rates when carried by a fluid.) Publication was accompanied by a certain amount of hullabaloo in the press—“Bordeaux Wine Snobs Have a Point, According to This Computer Model,” exclaimed the New York Times. 

A press release from the University of Geneva (where the work was done in collaboration with the University of Bordeaux) made quite striking claims. “Artificial intelligence has succeeded in identifying with 100 percent precision the chemical identity of red wines coming from seven grand domaines in Bordeaux […]. This opens the way to potential new tools to combat fraud.”²

The basic claim of the article is that each estate can be distinguished by the chemical composition of its wines. This is not exactly a surprise in principle. Unless you believe in the supernatural, it should be obvious that the chemical constitution of any two wines must be different. But wine is so complex that all attempts so far to identify individual molecular markers for châteaux or regions have failed to convince, although there are certainly markers for different varieties. 

The raw analysis divides the compounds being analyzed into three groups: esters (the major class of volatile compounds in wine), oak (specifically compounds introduced by aging in oak), and off-flavor (responsible for known flaws). The machine-learning technique utilized to present the results reduces the data for each château and vintage to a single point on a two-dimensional plot (one point for each vintage tested, which in effect merges the information for the three categories for that vintage). The points for each château form a relatively discrete cluster. This is interpreted as evidence that each château can be identified by a unique profile.³

The conclusions are enormously undercut by the fact that the châteaux are not identified. All we know are the appellations: one wine from Pomerol, two from St-Emilion (but we don’t know whether either or both came from the plateau or the plain, which makes a big difference), two from Pauillac, one from Margaux, and one from Pessac-Léognan. This means that a basic principle of science—that enough information is given for a study to be reproduced by others—has been breached.

A great deal of manipulation from the original data is needed to get to the simple presentation of the two-dimensional plot. “Manipulation” is not pejorative; it has become a common feature of science that—over the past, say, half-century—scientists have become further and further removed from their data by the use of complicated analytical techniques. AI is probably the ultimate technique for separating scientists from their data.

I am particularly sensitive to the issue of how much convolution is appropriate in analyzing data because I have just published a book, Inside Science, which tries to explain how science really works. One of the issues I discuss is the need for transparency and reproducibility, and how this is affected by artificial intelligence, which almost by definition makes it hard to sustain the traditional criteria for accepting scientific results. In experimental science, the best answer to the problem of validating conclusions generated by AI is to look at downstream effects, to see whether predictions following from the conclusions can be confirmed by other methods. This is not applicable here.

So, I am a bit skeptical as to whether to accept the significance of this type of analysis in principle. Basically, up to 30,000 individual data points from the original chromatogram for each wine were reduced by using artificial-intelligence methods into a single data point on the final plot. (There is nothing so conventional as an error bar to indicate the range of reliability.) For someone brought up in a traditional scientific background, accepting this takes a certain act of faith.

Different differences 

To move the argument along, let’s accept for working purposes that this could be a method that reveals chemical differences between wines. In that case, what might be the basis for the difference? The most likely explanation is simply varietal constitution. The wines vary extensively. Aside from a varietal Merlot, all are blends, with Cabernet Sauvignon between 0 and 90 percent, Cabernet Franc from 0 to 56 percent, and Merlot from 0 to 100 percent. Since the Cabernets are among the more aromatic black grape varieties, this range would predict that the varietal range alone produces wide variation in the chromatograms.

We really have to dispose of the possibility that the results mostly represent varietal differences if the study is to be taken seriously as showing that the wines of individual châteaux can be distinguished. There are no controls in the conventional sense to address this issue—indeed, there are no controls for any of the variables that might affect the aromatic profile of a wine—but there are some data plots intended to show that varietal constitution cannot account for the whole explanation. These are based on computational analysis, so this is in effect a sort of manipulation squared. But if it’s right that each château can be identified by its profile, despite annual variation in the blend, it would be reasonable to suppose that varietal constitution is not the whole story.

Information about the identities of the château is beyond confusing, because the varietal compositions stated for several of the châteaux simply do not correspond with any property in the stated appellations.⁴ The wines for the château corresponding to Pessac-Léognan, for example, are claimed to have 75–90 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and about 5 percent Petit Verdot. It would be most interesting indeed to find a classified growth in Pessac with such a high level of Cabernet Sauvignon.

I decided to reverse engineer the identity of the châteaux from the varietal constitutions given for their wines each year.⁵ The results were surprising. I deduce that the wines are Lafite Rothschild, Latour, Margaux, and Haut-Brion from the Left Bank. Identification of the Right Bank châteaux is less secure, but following the pattern, it seems probable that the 100 percent Merlot might be Château Petrus (Le Pin is another possibility), while Château Cheval Blanc is definitely one of the St-Emilions. (Data for the other potential St-Emilion do not seem to conform to Ausone.) It seems that the authors focused their attention on the greatest wines of Bordeaux. 

The problem is that several châteaux have been assigned to the wrong appellations. The data for Haut-Brion correspond to an estate supposed to be in St-Emilion; the data for Château Margaux correspond to the estate that is said to represent Pessac-Léognan; and the data for the château that should be in Margaux actually correspond to Lafite Rothschild. (Is it unfair to ask whether this level of confusion casts doubt on whether we can trust the extensive data reduction required to generate the basic plots on which the study rests?)

Now I have to return to the basic data, which show that data points for the three châteaux assigned to the Médoc cluster together, separated by the single château from Pessac-Léognan from a group of the clusters of châteaux from the Right Bank. It would be awfully neat if the geography of Bordeaux was reproduced in the plots representing aromatic profiles. The problem is that, basing the identification of châteaux on varietal constitutions (instead of accepting the stated appellation), châteaux from the same area are no longer clustered—for example, the estate that is the piggy in the middle (between the Médoc and the Libournais) is not in Pessac-Léognan but is really Château Margaux.⁶

Let’s set this muddle aside and suppose for argument’s sake at least that each château is identified by a distinct profile. If this is correct, it poses another question that casts some doubt on whether it’s valid to extrapolate further from the results. Basing the analysis on seven of the most distinctive châteaux in Bordeaux, is it reasonable to draw a general conclusion that the method allows identification of any château “with 100 percent certainty”? It is not a surprise that the greatest châteaux in Bordeaux are distinctive, but would we get equally distinctive results if the seven châteaux were all at the level of cru bourgeois or were petits châteaux?⁷

In addition to the varietal effects, what other factors might influence the results? Yeasts used during the fermentation, the extraction methods during fermentation, the duration of maceration, the amount of new wood used in aging, and the duration of aging are all likely to have effects. In particular, the amount of new oak is likely to have significant effects on the aromatic profile. (It seems plausible that it might be possible to identify the amount of exposure to new oak during aging by chromatographic analysis, but since there is no information about oak-aging regimes used in this particular set of results, it’s impossible to say to what extent it may have contributed.) If I am correct, however, about the identities of the châteaux, new oak will have been a prominent component and may have been close to 100 percent in all of the cases.

It is possible that the combination of the multiple effects responsible for generating aromatic differences in the wines is indeed unique for each château. But it seems premature to conclude that individual châteaux can be analyzed on the basis of results of seven out of 10,000 châteaux in Bordeaux (and not just any châteaux, but the very top, most distinctive ones, at that). The two samples from Pauillac are the only case where the châteaux are close enough for individual variation, as distinct from a generic geographical origin, to be a plausible explanation. Two châteaux are rather thin pickings for concluding that this is a valuable new method.

So, the hope of using the method to detect fraud is some way off. Perhaps it would be useful to analyze geographical origins in a broad sense, possibly to investigate claims for 100 percent usage of new oak or, even better (potentially if ambitiously), to distinguish use of barriques from staves or oak dust. If we accept the results at face value, the technique would not be useful to detect cases where one vintage is passed off as another.

There is an interesting playoff here between producers and terroir. The classic view of terroir would argue that each vineyard should be identified by common features in the aromatic profile of the wines. Would a comparable analysis of Burgundy identify groups of wines according to geography (that is, terroir) or according to producers (winemaking)? I submit that it’s impossible to develop any reliable interpretation of the results without taking this concern under advisement. I certainly don’t exclude the possibility that there is something interesting here, but the case is not proven yet, and the claims made for the results are exaggerated, to say the least (not, unfortunately, an uncommon situation in science today).

Terroir as an act of faith

Suppose that we wanted to use this type of analysis to show that terroir produces a specific chromatographic profile. How would we proceed? The first critical demand is that the vineyards in question should be planted with the same (preferably sole) variety and that the vines should be the same cultivar and have the same age. Obviously, the vineyards should be cultivated in the same way. Then winemaking should be identical in all cases. It would actually be better if the wines were aged in oak-free conditions so as to reduce extraneous effects on the aromatic profile. Those conditions are sufficiently difficult to achieve that I do not expect anyone to satisfy them in the foreseeable future.

Another crucial feature is needed to distinguish the effects of terroir from the effects of winemaking. Grapes should be analyzed immediately after harvesting, as well as analyzing completed wines, for which the most appropriate stage of analysis is probably bottling. If any differences are due to terroir, surely they should show in the grapes. In principle, differences could be either magnified or reduced by fermentation. (Producers who use fermentation by indigenous yeasts, which they regard as part of the terroir, would argue that adding a specific yeast strain for fermentation reduces the impact of terroir.) Analysis of grapes by itself would be open to the criticism that there’s no proof that any differences actually have significant effects on the organoleptic profile of the wine, but analyzing only wine leaves greater possibilities that effects are due to specifics of winemaking—perhaps even to unremarked features.

Yeasts are the most obvious source of aromatic variability in wine—in fact, by far the greatest proportion of aromatic compounds are produced by fermentation rather than being present in the grape. (I emphasize aromatic compounds because that is what chromatographic analysis focuses on.) In fact, consider the extreme case of Brett. 

Brett, caused when the yeast Brettanomyces contaminates a wine, has a particularly pungent aromatic profile, marked by the compounds 4-ethylphenol and 4-ethylguaiacol. During the 1980s and ’90s, the wines of several châteaux in Bordeaux were marked by Brett. This was due not to adventitious infection of individual bottles but to contamination of the wineries. (Would this be regarded as an adjunct to terroir?) During that period, this new method would no doubt have been very successful at distinguishing the wines of the infected châteaux from the wines of their uninfected neighbors. To a lesser extent, the yeasts used in fermentation could well contribute to distinctive results in individual châteaux.

(I don’t want to get into the issue of whether yeasts are part of terroir. Personally, I do not think so, because all the evidence says that the strains of indigenous yeasts differ from year to year. But if they were included, would that mean that Brett was part of the terroir of some châteaux, albeit transiently, during the period of infection? If that is an oxymoron, it points to the difficulty of the situation, which is why it is best to leave yeast out of terroir.) 

Three years ago, I analyzed some exaggerated claims for the “irrefutable proof” of terroir by chemical analysis (“How to Prove Terroir Exists (and Do We Really Want to?)” in WFW 72, pp.110–11).⁸ This work analyzed Malbec grown in several different single vineyards in Mendoza. I concluded that the results probably demonstrated that chemical differences are produced by altitude, most likely because the exposure to ultraviolet with increasing altitude increases tannins and total phenols due to thickening of the grape skins. Here is another demonstration that the laws of physics apply to grape growing but, I am afraid, not at all a demonstration of any effect of terroir other than altitude.

Would terroir exist or, at least, would it manifest itself in the same way if a region changed the varieties it grows? Suppose we are in 2050. It is much hotter everywhere, so hot in Bordeaux that the authorities have finally relented on their commitment to Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot and have allowed Syrah to be grown. Suppose that Syrah has in fact become the majority grape. Would the first growths still be the top wines? Would the difference between Pauillac and St-Julien still show as plushness versus finesse? Would the differences be different? 

Some years ago, I asked Frédéric Engerer at Château Latour if he thought its character would show in the same way with a different variety. “Maybe we should plant some Syrah, but it is a bit complicated,” he said. “You would see the same effect. The nobility of the whole thing is just the terroir. The Cabernet Sauvignon is just the instrument; it is just the tool to express differences between terroirs. I would think [the same] would be true with another grape variety.”

Terroir expresses itself through the variety. Each variety has a favored terroir in which it produces its best results: gravel for Cabernet Sauvignon, limestone for Pinot Noir, granite for Syrah. When we talk about effects of terroir, we are mostly describing what happens when a variety grows on variations of its favorite terroir. I do not think it is axiomatic that it would show the same sensitivity to other terroirs, or that the effects of different terroirs would necessarily be the same on every variety. Of course, that is not an argument against the importance of terroir—quite the reverse—but it might mean that there needs to be some caution about extrapolating the results from individual situations that are likely to have been highly selected.

So, does terroir exist? Yes. Can we demonstrate it yet by any objective means? No.

I have to admit that terroir remains an act of faith. This is not entirely a comfortable position for a scientist, but it’s better than accepting the validity of inadequate science.

Notes

1. M Schartner, JM Beck, J Laboyrie, L Riquier, S Marchand, and A Pouget, “Predicting Bordeaux Red Wine Origins and Vintages from Raw Gas Chromatograms,” Communications Chemistry 6, article 247 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1038/s42004-023-01051-9 

2. In claiming to predict the origins of a wine from raw gas chromatograms, the title of the paper is misleading. In fact, very complicated calculations are needed to produce the data plots that are claimed to show the difference.

3. The samples represent years from 1990 to 2007 and were collected from the châteaux in 2019. It is very surprising that there should not be more vintage variation in the results, given that the original objective of the exercise was to investigate aging in red Bordeaux. Justine Laboyrie, “Composition et origine du bouquet de vieillissement des vins rouges de Bordeaux. Influences du terroir dans l’expression aromatique des vins vieux,” Médecine Humaine et Pathologie, Université de Bordeaux, 2020.

4. The châteaux are simply identified as A (Pomerol), B and C (St-Emilion), D and E (Pauillac), F (Margaux), and G (Pessac-Léognan). In the table giving varietal constitutions, however, the châteaux are identified as A, B, F, G, S, T, and V. We can only guess how S, T, and V might correspond to C, D, and E. From the varietal compositions given for the wine samples, it appears that B is in fact Haut-Brion, F is in fact Lafite Rothschild, G is Château Margaux, and T is Latour. S could be Petrus, V is Cheval Blanc, and A cannot be identified. (I deduce that it is a château in St-Emilion—though it is stated to be in Pomerol—which has the capacity to consistently generate a wine from exactly 50 percent Merlot and 50 percent Cabernet Franc every year.) 

5. I assumed that the data correspond to a specific château if there is an exact match in each year between the varietal composition stated for the sample and that reported by the château, with no more than two years failing to conform.

6. If the IDs of the samples used for the main analysis are correct, the conclusions are suspect (because the groups of clusters would represent different appellations from those identified by the authors). So far as it’s possible to make out from the IDs, it seems that the supposed Right Bank group actually includes Haut-Brion; the in-between château is Margaux, not one in Pessac-Léognan (as described in main text above); and the supposed Médoc group must include at least one Right Bank wine.

7. By identifying the château through varietal composition, I deduce that the wines that have been analyzed are the grand vins, not the second wines, but this also makes the point that it would be interesting to compare each grand vin with the second wine.

8. R Urvieta, G Jones, F Buscema, R Bottini, & A Fontana, “Terroir and Vintage Discrimination of Malbec Wines Based on Phenolic Composition Across Multiple Sites in Mendoza, Argentina,” Scientific Reports volume 11 (2021), article 2863.

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Alex Maltman explains how five of the world’s most celebrated vineyard soils earned their exalted reputations.

When young William Gimblett sailed out of London in 1878, headed for a new life in New Zealand, he must have had little idea of what lay ahead of him. He is scarcely likely to have imagined that 30 years later he would be raising sheep, acclaimed for his precocious “Gimblett lambs.” That came about because, after settling in the North Island’s Hawke’s Bay, he purchased some land just inland from Napier, strikingly stony but nicely sheltered, and its relative warmth meant his lambs reached maturity considerably earlier than those of his neighbors. And he is extremely unlikely to have imagined that, 100 years later, the land would be bearing grapevines, with those self-same, warm, gravelly soils given his name and known to wine enthusiasts the world over.

All the world’s grapevines are, of course, growing in soils of one kind or another. They all provide stable anchoring along with water and nutrients; but in just a few places, they have acquired a designation of their own, names that are treasured by wine lovers. So, we have galestro and llicorella, Willakenzie and gore, roten schiefer and galets roulées—names that probably mean little to most people but that, for wine enthusiasts, can prompt images of special places and wines of distinction. In this article, I will explore the stories and the science behind five such named soils, examples that have become legendary in the world of wine.

The Kimmeridgian of Chablis 

Where is the largest onshore oilfield in western Europe? It’s in the southwestern UK, and is certainly no newfangled development. For centuries, the folks there knew that some of the local rocks could burn, and from them such things as varnish, grease, and paraffin could be manufactured; a “nodding donkey” outside one of the villages has been pumping oil for more than 60 years. The name of the village? Kimmeridge.

The word is legendary to wine lovers: the Kimmeridgian of Chablis is perhaps the single most famous vineyard soil in the world, and the best loved. Perhaps it is also the most misunderstood. Why so? Well to start with, my point in mentioning oilfields is to underline that in geology “Kimmeridgian” denotes a particular period of time and not a kind of rock or soil: There are no hydrocarbon-bearing strata around the village of Chablis. But the limestones and marls at Chablis formed at the same time as the oily rocks at Kimmeridge, so both are referred to as Kimmeridgian in age.

Similarly, there are rocks at Kirkland Lake, just west of the Quebec/Ontario province line in Canada, that formed deep within the Earth—so deep that they experienced pressures sufficient for diamonds to form in them. They are Kimmeridgian. In northern Turkey, there are Kimmeridgian granites; and very different kinds of igneous rock, though also Kimmeridgian, occur in the Coast Ranges of western California. In other words, describing the vineyard soils at Chablis as Kimmeridgian carries little meaning without prior knowledge of what kinds of materials they are.

But (putting aside the problem of explaining the popular belief that the particular nature of Chablis wines is somehow due, notwithstanding the unique climate and physical setting of the Chablis slopes, to the vineyard soil) there are also further misunderstandings about the term. 

Wine writers seem to assume that in science the term Kimmeridgian is neatly defined; in fact, geologists have argued about exactly what it means for more than 200 years, sometimes decidedly vituperatively. Some have recommended that the term should be discarded altogether. Finally, however, as recently as 2021 an international scientific agreement was reached on what Kimmeridgian should actually mean. Even so, one continuing problem in practice is that the now-accepted definition is based on certain fossils (very particular kinds of ammonites) that aren’t present in many rocks probably of Kimmeridgian age, and this is the case at Chablis.

In any case, for us in the wine world there are two problems that are more fundamental than these technical matters. First, grapevines simply don’t care anyway, so to speak, about the geological age of the vineyard rocks. Wine promoters and commentators love to mention the names of geological periods and often imply that the older the age of the vineyard rocks, somehow the more profound and complex the wine. Really, however, it’s the physical and chemical properties that are relevant to the vine, not the geological age, no matter how old.

Second, all this business of geological age is referring to the bedrock, the intact substrate of the vineyard. It may have fissures into which deeper vine roots probe for supplementary water, but otherwise it is the overlying, humus-bearing, loose material—the soil—in which most of the vine roots grow and obtain water and nutrition. And almost invariably, the soil is vastly younger than the bedrock. In most of the world’s temperate zones, certainly in the glaciated northern hemisphere, the soils are no older than a few thousand years and are still forming. In other words, the phrase “Kimmeridgian soil” isn’t really referring to the soil at all. 

The Kimmeridgian bedrock at Chablis lies beneath the middle parts of the vine-covered slopes, with younger strata capping the hills and older ones at the base. The soil, though, isn’t fixed; through time it inevitably creeps downslope. So, for centuries growers have had to cart the jumbled debris accumulated at the foot of the slopes back up to where the vines are growing; consequently the mid-slope viticultural soils are rather mixed.

A Google search linking Kimmeridgian and Chablis yields thousands of results, nearly all enthusing about the importance of the connection between the two. Few, though, suggest that there are any difficulties.

The albarizas of Sherry country

Diatoms and radiolaria (see previous page) have been called “architectural marvels.” The filigreed arrangement of their glassy white shells has inspired structures such as geodesic domes, as well as visionary furniture. Both kinds of creatures are extremely tiny—they’re varieties of microscopic oceanic plankton—and they are both made of silica (silicon and oxygen). There are other similarly intricate planktonic organisms such as foraminifera, but with shells made of white calcium carbonate. All of them float in the world’s oceans in prodigious numbers and sometimes, if conditions are right, one of the varieties can flourish in even more extraordinary numbers, the debris dominating the ocean-floor sediments.

Exactly that happened around 20 million years ago in the seaway that then connected the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. (The sea floor eventually became uplifted to make land, the region of Spain we know as Andalusia.) From time to time, sands or muds would sweep in from the nearby land, and although diatoms flourished throughout, populations of the other plankton fluctuated as conditions in the sea water varied. Today, all this has an influence on the drink we call Sherry.

Back in time, a series of sediments was built up on the sea floor, eventually to be hardened into rocks with the planktonic organisms preserved as microfossils. Today, those rocks—essentially marls—form the Andalusian landscape and are weathering into soils. They are known there as moronitas and all are rich in diatoms. But in the Jerez-Sanlúcar Sherry district, they have vernacular names such as arenas for those that are sandier or barros for those richer in clay. And for those particularly rich in calcareous plankton—all pale colored but in places startlingly white—albarizas. These well-drained, low-fertility soils yield the finest grapes for Sherry, not least because they tend to occupy the tops of the area’s rolling hills and hence benefit crucially from cooling sea breezes. 

Additionally, the fossilized hollow shells of the plankton, together with the little spaces between them, give the soils a loose structure that allows extensive root systems and an excellent capacity for storing rainwater—invaluable during the arid growing seasons of Andalusia. A piece of albariza, surprisingly light because of all the little holes, can absorb up to one third of its volume in water, rather like a sponge. (These white, powdery albarizas are often called chalk, though geologically speaking they contain insufficient amounts of the microfossil that defines true chalk—coccolithophores—and they formed about 70 million years after the type of chalk in England and northern France.) 

With time, the region’s growers learned of subtypes of albariza soils and demarcated the different wines they yielded. During the past century, however, such nuances became lost as the market for Sherry dwindled and wine store shelves became dominated by heavily promoted brands. Wine distinctions deriving from their terroirs vanished. 

Today, a new generation of producers is striving to restore the status of Sherry as a fine wine and to resuscitate the characteristics of different vineyards. The albarizas terroir scheme devised by García del Barrio Ambrosy, for instance, has seven different subclasses, based on such things as altitude or slope, as well as the soils. Right now, there are around 20 producers selling wines emphasizing their derivation from different types of albarizas. Examples include tosca de barajuelas, the soil richest in diatoms and hence the lightest and most porous, with a leafy, laminated structure that encourages the roots to grow sideways. Tosca cerada is more calcareous, with the lowest proportion of siliceous diatoms, soft when wet but becoming baked when dry. The soft, foraminifera-rich tosca lentejuelas (literally “sequins”) encourages deeper roots, which is said to give lighter, more elegant wines. 

Almost certainly, the contribution of these soils to the differences in the wines arises primarily from fine variations in their water-holding capacities, due to various proportions and compactions of sand grains, clay, and the different microfossils. But there may be additional effects. Some growers say that the thicker grape skins produced on softer albarizas like barajuelas bear a lesser proportion of wild, indigenous yeasts and that the soils may even influence the kind of yeast. Some say that softer albariza soils encourage the vigorous beticus strain, whereas wines from denser soils have a higher chance of developing the gentler montuliensis. These are both film (surface) yeasts, and so are intrinsic to the flor that characterizes Sherry.

Perhaps, then, Sherry is on the threshold of a new terroir-driven era, with the albarizas regaining their celebrated status and familiarity. (The word is already appearing, through the Sherry casks used for aging, on the labels of some whiskies.) And central to it all, down there in the Andalusian soils, are those little architectural marvels.

Napa’s Rutherford dust

It’s a catchy phrase, Rutherford dust. Growers in California’s Napa Valley love to use it and, inter alia, it has appeared in poetry, as the trademark of a bottled water, and as the title of pieces of music. But in the wine world it’s of mythical status—and some would say literally so. For whether it actually refers to a soil is much debated; what the term really means is far from clear.

There seems to be no record of the expression’s origin; how and when it was first used is clothed in anecdote. Some say it’s due to the great UC Davis academic Maynard Amerine. That’s not hard to imagine, seeing as Amerine was so fond of sayings: “Wine quality is easier to detect than define”; “Drink wines, not labels”; “Wine is a chemical symphony”… 

But most point to the much-quoted saying of André Tchelistcheff: “It takes Rutherford dust to make great Cabernet.” At face value, this seems a pretty clear reference to soil, but Tchelistcheff, being winemaker at Rutherford’s Beaulieu Vineyards, would have known very well that the soil there is a far cry from being dusty. Dust is fine stuff, carried by the air. The Rutherford AVA stretches eastward, from alluvial gravels across the valley of the Napa River, which over time has deposited spreads of loams, sands, and silts. Nothing as fine as dust, and none of it ever airborne. 

The western parts of the AVA flank the Mayacamas Mountains and are slightly higher than the valley floor, a landform colloquially called in this part of the world a “bench.” The Rutherford Bench is home to such revered wineries as Inglenook (formerly Niebaum-Coppola Estate) and Far Niente, as well as Beaulieu, and consequently many a wine-loving tourist wants to see the celebrated bench. The relative elevation is only slight, however, and the slope onto it barely noticeable, say, as you drive on Highway 19. So, one or two institutions here have thoughtfully catered for sightseers by providing a fittingly named wooden bench, for sitting and taking selfies.

The real Rutherford Bench is an alluvial fan, formed by streams emerging from the Mayacamas Mountains and immediately dropping their coarsest sediment. Less coarse material is carried farther eastward, down to the middle parts of the apron. The finest sediment forms the outer fringes, where it interfingers with the alluvium of the Napa River itself. The soils are of suitably limited fertility and superbly drained—some vine roots probe 20ft (6m) or more to find their water. In reality, it’s all more complex than this, not least because through time the streams switch their routes and braid across the fan, which is why the soil properties vary so intricately.

Why, then, did Tchelistcheff (or whoever) refer to these coarse soils as dust? Certainly, some believe the term does refer to the soil: “Rutherford dust is a mixture of gravel, sand, loam, and volcanic deposits that permeates the Rutherford bench plateau [sic]”; “We walked between the vine rows, kicking up the famous Rutherford dust.” Perhaps Tchelistcheff really meant “dirt,” in the colloquial American sense? 

More commonly, the expression is taken to refer not just to the soils but rather to the overall characteristics of the area: Rutherford dust “essentially refers to the unique terroir particularly with respect to Cabernet Sauvignon.” The Rutherford Bench experiences Napa’s warmth but is nicely tempered by maritime air drifting northward from San Francisco Bay; it receives relatively more sun exposure through being located at the Valley’s widest point yet has a significant diurnal temperature variation. These special combinations lead to wines of special character, and many believe that the true meaning of the phrase lies in the wine itself. 

But even this is unclear. Some think of aroma: “an intriguing aromatic element often referred to as Rutherford dust”; “the signature Rutherford dust smell.” Whereas others think of taste: “a mysterious, spicy element known as Rutherford dust”; “the wines are very Rutherfordesque. You can taste the dust.” Mouthfeel, however, is most commonly mentioned: “a nuance attached to the back of the mouth”; “Tchelistcheff was talking about granular or ‘dusty’ tannins that couple with cocoa powder.” Tannins are frequently mentioned in tasting notes on Rutherford wines, and research has shown that a restricted water provision, exactly as these bench soils provide, is an important factor in developing grape tannins. 

Given the experience and insight of people such as Amerine and Tchelistcheff, it seems likely that something like this was in mind when the term was coined. That’s the view of the association of local wineries, the Rutherford Dust Society: The word dust “evokes in four simple letters a specific place and a complex set of flavors.” As Andy Beckstoffer, who worked with Tchelistcheff, put it, “When he said, ‘The wines must have Rutherford dust in them,’ he did not mean they had to taste of dust. André meant they needed to taste like they came from Rutherford’s vineyards.”

Even so, there are those who see the phrase as purely allegorical, referring figuratively to a “magic dust” sprinkled over this charmed area. Or perhaps with a touch of cynicism, a “gold dust,” reflecting the dizzying prices that some of the area’s wines can command. (Tchelistcheff once said that “money is the dust of life.”)

Yes, Rutherford dust is a catchy phrase, but its meaning is imprecise, apparently lying somewhere in a blurry matrix of interpretations. Perhaps, to paraphrase the words of Humpty Dumpty—not unlike some other words in the wine lexicon—it means what you want it to mean. 

The terra rossa of Coonawarra 

Picture the scene: the Australian Outback. A vast horizon shimmering beneath an azure sky, bushy acacias and perhaps eucalyptus, maybe even a kangaroo or two. And, of course, the red ground. In places, dazzlingly red. Much of interior Australia has a distinctly ruddy look, and it’s essentially due to iron. 

Warm regions across the world tend to have soils that are more or less red, depending on the proportions of certain iron minerals. Most widespread is the rust-orange, ocherous goethite, named after the German polymath and avid mineral collector. Hematite, as its name suggests, is the color of blood, and it’s this that makes some soils so vividly red. That effect is seen widely in Mediterranean areas, where the soil has long been venerated. Since ancient times, it has been used as a pigment in sacred tombs, and in certain religions it’s seen as the very dust from which God created man. (In Biblical Hebrew, the soil is called adamah, dam meaning blood and adam meaning red.) 

In recent centuries, the reddest soils have become known by the Italian name terra rossa, and science has long been grappling with understanding them. Exactly how red do the soils have to be to justify the name? Hence, scientists juggle with the hues (specific colors), values (lightness and darkness), and chromas (color intensities) to try to agree on limits of appropriate redness. 

How do they form? There is general agreement that true terra rossa forms only on limestone and usually involves the slow dissolving away of calcium carbonate to leave an insoluble residue of clays stained by hematite. But in some places, rather than being a residue, the limestone has been slowly replaced by iron and clays in situ, by capillary waters rising through the rock. And elsewhere, chemical analyses show a substantial input of red material that must have originated somewhere else, such as the wind-blown Sahara dust in the terra rossa of Croatia’s Istrian peninsula. 

There’s also a consensus that terra rossa formation needs warm summers but wetter winters, plus well-aerated, oxygenized conditions so that the insoluble oxidized form of iron—ferric oxide, the mineral hematite—forms preferentially over hydrous goethite and other forms. Just such conditions arose in South Australia, in the region now called the Limestone Coast. And as in Mediterranean areas, the resulting terra rossa soils have proved conducive for growing quality grapes, such as in today’s noted wine regions of Robe, Mount Benson, Wrattonbully, and Padthaway. And of course Coonawarra.

Scotsman John Riddoch first succeeded with Coonawarra wine, such that by 1896 he was able to build a fine sandstone winery, with a distinctive triple-gabled frontage. For various reasons, however, his initial success gradually faded, though the locals remained convinced of the area’s brilliant potential. Eventually, after decades of neglect, in 1951 the Wynn family took the bold step of buying Riddoch’s old winery and its surrounding vineyards with a view to producing world-class wines. It worked. Just two years later, their Wynns Coonawarra Estate Claret was being exported to England—transported on the royal yacht Britannia, no less. Today, the Wynns label, with its triple-gabled insignia, is one of the wine world’s most iconic.

Nowadays, there is little of Coonawarra’s narrow strip of terra rossa that is not carpeted by thriving vineyards. Some of them produce grapes under contract; others supply the three dozen or so cellar doors. Several of the latter are so proud of their soils that they maintain a trench so visitors can clamber down to see how the vine roots probe through the red soil to try to penetrate the hard but fractured limestone below. Two things are immediately noticeable in the trench walls. One is the abruptness of the change from the terra rossa to the underlying white limestone. Second is the “waviness” of the line that separates the two, representing in three dimensions an irregular, uneven boundary, just the kind of surface that limestone forms when exposed to the atmosphere: the fissures and pits of karst. 

Plenty of wine writings still refer to Coonawarra’s terra rossa being an in situ residue, but it’s more complicated than that. During the past half-million years or so, the Limestone Coast region consisted of a series of coastal reefs and dunes, changing position and height as sea levels fluctuated. Accumulations of wind-blown calcareous clayey silt, sitting on a porous limestone bedrock and filling its surface hollows, produced the higher ridges. The Coonawarra strip is just such a rise, merely meters higher than the surrounding damp land but sufficient to give a drainage and aeration that leaches the calcium from the wind-blown deposits to leave insoluble clays reddened by hematite. 

Today, the resulting terra rossa provides a restrained fertility ideal for grapevines, together with some water storage, crucially enhanced by the underlying fissured limestone. Moreover, the rise in elevation, albeit slight, raises air dryness and exposure to sunlight. Consequently, the Cabernet grapes for which Coonawarra is noted are smaller and more intensely colored than those from the adjacent moist soils, and their phenols ripen well to give the area’s characteristic blackcurrant and minty wines. The wine color, incidentally, is largely due to anthocyanins, the red pigments in the grape skins, and despite what some writers assert, it has no connection with the redness of the soil.

Coonawarra is hardly a tourist mecca. It’s located away from the region’s main highways and is a strip of virtually flat vineyards with mostly new winery buildings; the settlement itself comprises little more than a shop, a restaurant, and a few cottages. Yet to watch its terra rossa glowing under the setting of a flaming Australian sun is a wondrous sight, worthy of one the world’s most famous vineyard soils.

The Gimblett Gravels of Hawke’s Bay

One hundred and fifty years ago, much of New Zealand’s North Island belonged to the Māori, but European settlers were arriving thick and fast, seeking to claim the most fertile tracts. The Hawke’s Bay area was attractive: Three major rivers were bringing in spreads of fertile alluvium, its climate was “proverbially mild and healthy,” and the Crown was negotiating the purchase of blocks of land. But there was a snag for the new settlers, especially farmers: the threat of flooding. 

Māori lore told of devastation resulting from periods of intense rain and swollen rivers every 40 years or so. Thus it was in 1867, when in ten days more than 15in (38cm) of rain fell and the rivers broke their banks: “The whole country from the hills in the extreme distance to the town of Napier was one vast sheet of water.” When the floodwaters eventually subsided, the Ngaruroro River had changed its position and, within five years, had completely deserted its old course. The pebbles and boulders that once formed the riverbed were left high and dry.

This new, stony ground was of little interest to the established farmers, but some settlers tried to see if anything could be done with it. There were efforts at sheep farming, and so it was that William Gimblett—he of the introduction to this essay—purchased some land and tried his hand at it. But his initial success with early lambs was not to last; the barren shingle was simply unable to sustain grazing pasture year after year. He had to move on. He vacated the land, and the access track he had used was gated off, though still vaguely referred to as Gimblett’s.

That riverbed land seemed pretty useless. One writer remarked that even rabbits wouldn’t venture onto it without taking a packed lunch. In 1981, however, another emigrant Englishman saw a new possibility. Chris “CJ” Pask had a few vineyard plots in coastal Hawke’s Bay and ran an aerial fertilization business with his little Auster aircraft. His plots could produce decent Merlots, but the great prize of the time, Cabernet Sauvignons, were in most years too unripe and herbaceous. Cabernet was deemed “a difficult cultivar.”

One day, however, while flying over the dry pebbles of that old riverbed, CJ was reminded of the gravelly soils he had seen in the Médoc and wondered if his Cabernets would have a better chance of ripening on that shingle—with a bit of his aerial top dressing. The inland areas were a few degrees warmer than those near the coast, and new measurements were showing the soil temperatures to be warmer still. That looked promising.

Several other growers took notice and planted a few vines. And to some surprise, when the wines were ready, they attracted considerable acclaim; what followed is now the subject of textbooks and scholarly articles on wine marketing. The growers organized themselves into a formal association and, instead of the usual approach of seeking an official appellation or protected geographical identity (a device that had never been embraced much by New Zealand producers anyway), applied for a registered trademark. The group didn’t specify techniques or grape varieties but sought to “protect and develop the reputation of the area” by precisely defining its limits, laying down strict quality requirements for the wines, and, of course, inventing a brand name. The area’s striking character lay in its river gravels, centered on William Gimblett’s old track. So the brand name simply fell out: Gimblett Gravels. 

The chief contribution of the gravelly soils is their free drainage. This results in a low soil fertility that restricts both the vine canopy and the sward between vine rows, enabling the bare stones to absorb the day’s heat for re-radiation at night. There is just enough topsoil to provide the humus-borne essential nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur, but all the other nutrients have to come from irrigation. Hawke’s Bay waters come largely from the inland mountains, rising among the deposits of the great Taupo volcano and passing eastward through a variety of sedimentary rocks such as the very impure sandstone called graywacke. Consequently, they easily have sufficient dissolved nutrients. 

Food purists may scorn tomatoes, salad crops, and the like produced hydroponically, but that is essentially the way these premium grapes are being grown. Viticulture here is impossible without irrigation; vines begin to fail if rodents chew through the supply pipes. So, it’s an interesting observation that while wines from the Gimblett Gravels are often cited as examples—outstanding examples—of terroir-driven wines, the grapevines’ vital water and nutrient supply come from far away.

Today, the area’s Cabernets are of international stature, while other red grapes such as Syrah, Tempranillo, and Malbec are fast gaining in repute; competition for space within this restricted acreage is fierce. A couple of statistics sum up this explosive success of the Gimblett Gravels. In the early 1980s, one hectare (2.47 acres) of land here was changing hands for less than $10,000; in 2020, the rate was more than $150,000. Provided, that is, it was within the area entitled to the Gimblett name. William himself would surely be amazed.

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Is it possible to formulate a rigorously scientific test for the theory of terroir, asks Benjamin Lewin MW, as he ponders the ways in which science is used in winemaking.

During the pandemic, when it became impossible to go to tastings, I left wine for a few months to write a book about the conduct of science. On returning to wine, I find that some of my attitudes have changed. When I came into wine from science two decades ago, I was struck by how scientific some aspects of winemaking had become, especially vinification and, to a lesser extent, viticulture. Returning now, I am more conscious of the limitations of the scientific approach.

The first thing is to distinguish science from quasi-science. The philosopher Karl Popper developed the view that became dominant in science in the 20th century that a hypothesis is valid only if in principle it can be falsified. Hypotheses that cannot be falsified are dismissed as pseudo-science.

This is quite a strong criterion, since by that measure, pseudo-science nibbles away at the frontiers of science. The idea that life on earth might have originated with seeds sent from a distant galaxy, for example, though authored by a Nobel Prize winner and published in a serious scientific journal, is impossible to test in any way and would therefore qualify as pseudo-science. Some aspects of evolution are a bit questionable in terms of this stiff criterion. 

In fact, Popper’s criterion would admit mathematics, as well as physics, chemistry, and (most of) biology, to be science but would deny scientific status to social sciences or psychology. Most aspects of vinification could be treated as scientific by this criterion, but viticulture is more questionable.

The confounding yeast

Vinification does quite well as a science if framed in terms of hypotheses that could be falsified—at least in terms of the chemical processes involved in alcoholic fermentation, malolactic fermentation, or even aging. Whether it makes a difference if the fermentation vessel is concrete, stainless steel, or oak might be regarded (literally) as a hot topic (given the exothermic nature of fermentation) and is swaddled in mystery, but actually, in principle this could be tested by seeing whether any chemical differences are detected after fermentation of the same batch of grapes side by side in different vessels. Many of the processes of aging—especially effects on tannin, acid, and sugar levels—are ill defined but again, in principle, could be tested.

It is less obvious how to test viticulture, though oddly enough, the most dubious practice of all, biodynamics, is the most susceptible to proper scientific testing. There have been inconclusive attempts to test the difference between organic viticulture and full biodynamic viticulture, but I think the real way to test this would be to compare plots that were treated biodynamically but in which one plot gets the homeopathic preparations and the other gets only water. (There may or may not be something in the biodynamic preparations, but I am certain that the notion of “dynamized” water is complete nonsense; that could be tested, too, if anyone had the patience.)

There is the confounding phenomenon that the flavor of wine does not derive exclusively from grapes per se, and possibly not even principally. Wine is not grape juice, and many (or most) of the flavor components are generated as the result of fermentation, either creating, modifying, or magnifying components in the grapes. To some extent, these effects can be determined by the yeast, but if varietal typicity means anything, it must mean that there are differences in the grapes that could in principle be tested for variations caused by the viticultural environment. All the same, any attempt to examine viticulture and vinification on a scientific basis has to allow for the effects of yeast. 

Terroir as an act of faith 

The holy grail would be a scientific test of terroir. This is tricky because there are so many potential variables. The principle of a scientific test is to hold all variables constant except for the one that is being tested. But how are we to hold variables such as light, heat, wind, and rain constant in order to test for effects? And of course, it’s not necessarily true that the total amount of any variable is the appropriate measure—the extent of heat spikes, for example, could be a more important determinant of vintage character than overall heat during the growing season.

But in any case, these are not the most interesting variables to test. Even skeptics of the influence of terroir would probably concede that light, heat, wind, or water supply will definitely have an effect on the grapes. The sharp end of terroir is surely the effect of the soil, using soil here in the broadest sense to mean not merely bedrock, surface soil, physical properties such as drainage, and chemical properties such as mineral content, but also microbiological life. 

(As an aside, is it possible to divorce microbiological life from the grapevine itself? Could different rootstocks be more or less susceptible to different symbiotic fungi? Could the grapevine itself, or at least its rootstock, be part of terroir?)

To determine the effects of soil, we need to exclude environmental effects. It seems doubtful that we could find two plots with soils sufficiently different to be worth testing but that are close enough that the environment is effectively the same. And in any case, it’s really very hard to be sure that the environment is the same. Look at the many cases in Burgundy where plots of land appear to all intents and purposes indistinguishable, but results are reliably different every year, due to tiny (sometimes unknown) environmental effects, such as a slight tunnel for wind.

Extreme measures would be needed to systematize the environment, such as erecting a giant greenhouse. Rain and wind would be eliminated. Heat and light would surely be the same if the plots were reasonably close. The vines would need to be absolutely identical: same rootstock, same scion, same age.

Then the question becomes whether it’s possible to detect differences in the grapes grown in two greenhouses where everything is identical except the soil on which they are placed. But the more interesting question might be whether and how those differences are displayed when the grapes are converted into wine. If you believe that yeast could be part of terroir (though this is really a rather dubious concept), it’s even conceivable that differences could be demonstrated principally after fermentation. 

I have gone through this reductio ad absurdum to demonstrate the difficulty of investigating terroir in any truly scientific way. Applying Karl Popper’s criterion, almost all investigations of terroir to date qualify as pseudo-science rather than science, not necessarily because they are ill conceived or badly designed but because the difficulties of controlling so many variables make it impossible to construct a truly falsifiable hypothesis. Terroir must remain an act of faith, not a fact of science. 

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This word was probably originally forged along similar lines to the verb terroiter, which is seldom found in old French dictionaries but bears the rather pejorative sense of a rustic wine, one without elegance, and was perhaps used in much the same way as the verb tracer is employed today in Champagne.

This last is a term used for a wine incapable of assuming the qualities of “refinement” resulting from blending, which in turn is a technique based on human experience and proficiency.

Terroir and terre

It’s clear, however, that the word “terroir” contains the word terre and therefore bears within it the notion of soil. This simple fact alone has convinced people around the world that the taste of all high-quality wines is derived from the soil in which they were grown.

This perception formed the basis of the concept of an appellation, which binds a wine tightly to its production zone—a notion that France has conferred upon the world of wine at large. This concept has, in turn, been taken up and used by a wide variety of other products, whether derived from agriculture or not.

The question as to whether this linkage is an example of brilliant marketing or the result of an almost filial devotion to Mother Nature remains unanswered.

This issue has been entrenched and legitimized by the use of the term in all countries where good wines are produced and is particularly valid in cases where the definition of the word “terroir” includes the actions of human beings. But doubts on the interpretation of the term are cast by a conspiratorial fringe of idealists, who unthinkingly associate human intervention with artifice, casting it as a betrayal of the “truth,” or even as an out-and-out fraud.

For these true believers, everything is ultimately derived from the “genius” of the soil itself. They believe that the earth in which the vine grows not only supports the plant but protects it and defines the authentic taste of the wine it produces.

Rocky soil in Cabardes in the Languedoc. Photography by Ryan O’Connell / Flickr

They are armored in a philosophy that links together notions of minerality, mineralization, and an absolute belief in the geological matrices that underpin the vineyards, themselves the result of action by rain and wind over millions of years—a concatenation of elements all working harmoniously together toward an end that requires the absolute minimum of human intervention to reach its zenith.

You need to draw a pretty long bow before you can unite nature, geomorphology, biology, and, yes, enology—because after all, the liquid needs to ferment—in such a way as to allow all these moving parts to bow down in subservience to nature’s providence. The smartest of the advocates of this argument—few and far between though they are—are also interested in those influences pertaining to the above-ground portion of the vine.

They are prepared to give due acknowledgment to creative human practices that consist of more than merely monitoring the vines and, instead, act to “give birth” to good grapes. It is self-evidently true that we need to prune and train our vines so that they can produce not only grapes but grapes fit to produce wine via the intermediary of the fermentation process. 

Matters of taste 

But what of taste? We obviously need to find common ground in the way that we define what is authentic and qualitative when it comes to matters of taste, without consideration of what the origin of the grapes may bring to the table.

Many generations of wine producers have refined and perfected their practices according to the needs dictated by their grapes, their viticultural traditions, and, above all else, their own tastes—and none of this has changed over the course of the past 20 or so centuries.

Nevertheless, the evolution of our theoretical framework and the development of new technologies have, over the course of less than a century, overthrown every belief that we once took for granted—and all that at a time when we were beginning to codify our viticultural heritage.

Technology now enhances and transforms the physical impact of humans (and animals); the mystery of fermentation has given way to a precise and rigorous knowledge that allows the process to be controlled; and the attitude of consumers toward wine has been transformed—from regarding it as a nourishing and necessary daily drink, into one in which wine is perceived as a hedonistic pleasure. 

Other opinions and beliefs may once have been held by those who came from cultures without wine traditions, from regions other than those where Vitis vinifera was born and spread out across the landscape, but these people have become part of our tribe and now make wine, drink wine, and appreciate wine.

Some of us may regret this fact, and perhaps can even be a little bit afraid of these changes. It’s this fear and regret that have led to a return to the desire for “local” production, for the terroir of the homeland, and, therefore, for a world view that limits itself to a desire for tiny artisanal production that is, alas, so liminal in terms of global trade.

We should, in truth, fear these fundamentalists, those who will shamelessly ask us, “What gives you the right to say that oxidative flavors, mousiness, and all those characters that you consider to be deviations from the norm are not, in fact, the true taste of terroir, a taste that can be found only in wines that are made without manipulation or interference by human hand?”

If some restaurateurs served us food as rotten and rancid as the wines they apparently prefer, what kind of reply would they be able to give to this question?

Social convention and a respect for the norm is not a lazy submission to habit—rather, these characteristics are the very guarantee of a civilized society.  

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In the second of his reports on Japanese wine and sake, Jim Clarke explores sake terroir and the reasons behind—and limits to—the recent boom in sake GIs.

While many sake GIs have—like Japan’s wine GIs—been birthed at the prefecture level, it speaks to sake’s deep history that although its character is in many ways much further removed from its terroir, the sake world has been much more prepared to pinpoint its GIs more precisely. Sake’s first GI, Hakusan City, was created in 2005, and included only five breweries. For ten years it was an outlier, but 2015 and the creation of a national sake GI, Nihonshu or “Japanese Sake,” has stimulated a sake GI boom.

The national GI’s role was more-or-less to maintain Japanese sake’s reputation as a premium product in the face of rising bulk sake production in other parts of Asia. But inspiration for regional GIs largely came from wine. Yazaemon Kojima, 23^rd-generation owner of Toko Brewery in Yamagata, says they and other Yamagata breweries were spurred to create a GI by the conversations they were having abroad. “So many people wanted to understand sake like wine,” Kojima says. “Regionality was more important there than in the domestic market.” He says that only more recently have domestic sake drinkers begun to talk in regionality terms.

Yamagata: Easily defined

In 2016 Yamagata gained its GI. Yamagata’s sakes already had a reputation for a signature clear, crisp style and a tasting approval process, so it made it relatively easy to define the prefecture’s sakes in a way the Japanese Tax Agency could validate. Around the same time Master of Wine Kenichi Ohashi hosted a panel at a conference in Yamagata on GIs, and many brewers from all over the country left the conference with a bee in their bonnet. Since 2016 seven more sake GIs have been approved, and Tochigi and other prefectures have applications in the works. Some are prefecture-wide, and some are more geographically limited. Nadagogo, for example, embraces just five villages around Kobe where brewers have access to the local water, known as miyamizu, which has made the area famous for sake production since the early 19^th century.

The case for local rice

It’s actually typical of these earlier GIs that the requirements stipulate the brewery’s location and that the local water source be used, but don’t actually require the use of local rice. Wine drinkers sometimes have a hard time with that, but rice travels much more easily than grapes. Sake expert John Gauntner says it was typical to use local rice and local rice varieties until thirty or forty years ago, when the popularity of Yamada Nishiki rice led breweries to source from further afield. Today many brewers are focusing on local rice and traditional rice varieties again. Kojima says that 90% of their rice is local, favoring in particular the Dewasansan strain historical to the area. He and other Yamagata brewers are also highlighting locally developed yeast strains.

The newest sake GIs have incorporated more specific requirements into their regulations, including local rice and traditional rice varieties as well as specific yeast strains; some GIs have undergone revision along the same lines. It seems the government was more careful not to leave out brewers at first, and now are accepting that a precise definition gives the branding more consistency.

Branding or terroir statement?

Despite this added precision at this point sake GIs are definitely an act of branding more than a statement of terroir. This shows in a few ways. It’s notable that prefectures with big reputations in the sake world have been slow to get on board. Niigata, for example, is home to more sake breweries than any other prefecture, but has yet to file an application for a GI. The feeling seems to be that they already have good name recognition for the region, so the hassle of the GI application wouldn’t be worthwhile.

Gauntner is supportive of the GI concept, but feels that soon prefectures will start seeing diminishing returns on the publicity that comes with announcing a new sake GI. In addition, he wonders how prefectures can describe their sakes in terms that make their GI sound distinct from the competition. “There are 47 prefectures,” Gauntner says. “I think 60 percent of them have a regional style that can be identified with them, but within every prefecture not every producer will conform with that style.” Indeed, not even every sake within a given brewery will necessarily receive GI status. This is not necessarily a problem, though; plenty of Sonoma wineries also make North Coast or even California-appellated wines.

What is sake terroir?

The growth of GIs underscores the question of what is or what makes up sake terroir. Confining the discussion to the natural environment, Kojima points out that Yamagata’s colder climate affects what rice grows well there, makes for heavy winter snowfall which melts into good, soft water, and encourages a long, slow fermentation (sake brewing is traditionally done only in the cooler months of the year). But beyond that the sake brewer has so many variables they can influence that the same rice and water and even yeast can yield very different sakes in different hands. In the past diversity was perhaps kept in check by the brewers’ guilds, which jealously guarded local techniques and traditions, but these days technical knowledge is shared openly. So there is a certain arbitrary nature to the style that becomes the core of a given GI. However, it seems more and more brewers are feeling confined by the semaibuai system of classifying sake by the milling ratio, a system instituted in the 1990s. While it may be a patchwork, characterized by the exception as much as by the rules, a regional, prefecture-by-prefecture approach may provide a legitimate framework to talk about sake.

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