TERROIR - The Soil & The Soul
TERROIR - The Soil & The Soul. Two Vignerons Explain
Tell me where is terroir bred
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourish’d?
In a recent paper Randall Grahm wrote: ”Terroir is a composite of many physical factors - soil structure and composition, topography, exposition, micro-climate as well as more intangible cultural factors”. Matt Kramer once very poetically defined terroir as “somewhere-ness,” and this I think is the nub of the issue. I believe that “somewhereness” is absolutely linked to beauty and 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. The plant and the soil have learned to speak each other’s language, and that is why a particularly great terroir wine seems to speak with so much elegance.
Continues Grahm: “A great terroir is the one that will elevate a particular site above that of its neighbours. It will ripen its grapes more completely more years out of ten than its neighbours; its wines will tend to be more balanced more of the time than its unfortunate contiguous confreres. But most of all, it will have a calling card, a quality of expressiveness, of distinctiveness that will provoke a sense of recognition in the consumer, whether or not the consumer has ever tasted the wine before.”
Expressiveness, distinctiveness: words that should be more compelling to wine lovers than opulent, rich or powerful. He is talking about wines that are unique, wherein you can taste a different order of qualities, precisely because they encapsulate the multifarious differences of their locations. Grahm, like so many French growers, posits that the subtle secrets of the soil are best unlocked through biodynamic viticulture: “Biodynamics is perhaps the most straightforward path to the enhanced expression of terroir in one’s vineyard. Its express purpose is to wake up the vines to the energetic forces of the universe, but its true purpose is to wake up the biodynamicist himself or herself.”
Olivier Pithon articulates a similar holistic credo. “I discovered” the sensitivity to how wines can become pleasure, balance and lightness. The love of a job well done, the precision in the choice of interventions, the importance of tasting during the production of wines and the respect for the prime material, are vital. It may sound silly, but it’s everything you didn’t learn at school that counts. We never learn that it’s essential to make wines which you love. They never speak to you about poetry, love and pleasure. It seems natural to me to have a cow, a mare and a dog for my personal equilibrium and just as naturally comes the profound desire and necessity to fly with my own wings or to look after my own vines. Ever since then, I’ve had only one desire: to give everything to my vines so that then they give it back in their grapes and in my wine. You must be proud and put your guts, your sweat, your love, your desires, your joy and your dreams into your wine. Growing biologically was for me self evident, a mark of respect, a qualitative requirement and a choice of life style. It’s economically irrational for a young enterprise like mine but I don’t know any other way to be than wholly generous and natural.
I don’t do anything extraordinary. I work. I put on the compost. I use sulphur against the vine mildew and an infusion of horse tail for the little mildew that we have. This remains a base. As time goes by, through reading, exchanging ideas, wine tasting and other experiences, the wish to take inspiration from the biodynamic comes naturally. Silica and horn dung (501 and 500) complete the infusions of horse tail, fern and nettles which I use. My goal is to make the wine as good as possible by getting as much out of the soil as I can, whilst respecting our environment and considering the problem of leaving to generations to come healthy soil: “We don’t inherit the land of our ancestors; we lend it to our children”.
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Terroir - because one word is so freighted with meaning, because the critics perceive it as a “concept” appropriated by the French (the word is French after all, and a reflexive mot-juste!) and given a quasi-mystical, pantheistic spin, people will argue in ever-decreasing circles whether it is fact - or fiction. Who deniges of it? As Mrs Gamp might enquire. If you are a New World winemaker the word may have negative connotations insofar as it may be used as an alibi (by the French mainly) covering for lack of fruit or bad winemaking technique. The same people believe that terroir is solely associated with nostalgia for old-fashioned wines and a chronic resistance to new ideas. This is a caricature of the idea (terroir is not an idea), as if the term was invented to endorse the singular superiority of European growers. It is not old-fashioned to pursue distinctiveness by espousing minimal intervention in the vineyard and the winery, rather it denotes intelligence that if you’ve been given beautiful, healthy grapes that you translate their potential into something fine and natural. It is not old-fashioned to talk about spirit, soul, essence, harmony and individuality in wine even though these qualities cannot be measured with callipers. The biodynamic movement in viticulture and the Slow Food philosophy are progressive in their outlook and approach. Underpinning all their ideas are the notions of sustainability, ethical farming and achieving purity of flavour through fewer interventions. And so we return to the matter of taste. We say, as an intellectual truth, that every country or region naturally has its own terroir; however, not every vigneron has an intuitive understanding of it and, as a result of too many interventions - the better to create a wine that conforms to international models - the wine itself becomes denatured, emasculated and obvious. Eben Sadie, a South African vigneron, articulates his concern about interventionist winemaking: “I don’t like the term “winemaker” at all”, he explains. “Until recently it didn’t exist: now we live in a world where we “make” wines”. Eben continues, “to be involved with a great wine is to remove yourself from the process. In all the “making” the virtue of terroir is lost”. The final word goes to Samuel Guibert: “Firstly, you should remember that we do not make the wines. Nature makes the wines; in our case the Gassac (valley) makes the wines. And every year it is different. We have to remember to be humble before Nature.- Terroir is about such respect for nature; you can obviously force the wine to obey a taste profile by artificial means and it will taste artificial”. The great growers want to be able to identify Matt Kramer’s “somewhereness” in their wines, the specific somewhereness of the living vineyard. Yes, these wines have somewhat of the something from a particular somewhere, or to put it more reductively, they taste differently real. And we love ‘em!