Dr Vino's wine blog

The quarterly World of Fine Wines, an expensive ($139/year) newish print magazine that has a sparkling editorial board, has started a debate about terroir. However, since the magazine has only a promotional web site, Jancis Robinson has poached an interesting discussion about terroir away from what could have been on their message boards.

As readers of this blog know, I am running stories on terroir (see first) from various industry participants in the run-up to the UC Davis conference on terroir in early 2006. (Jancis also raises the stakes on the timeliness of terroir since she says that that current potential MW [Master of Wine–TC] candidates have to write is ‘What and where is Terroir?’) Well, I guess I should have asked Hugo Rose since his article in Issue 7 (dated July 25, 2005) of WoFW has generated lot of comments on Jancis’ site. The web teaser describes his article as:

Terroir on the Rocks. Hugo Rose MW tests the traditional notion of terroir and proposes a new paradigm that rests more on cultural and historical perspectives.

David Schildknecht who now covers German and Austrian wines for the group blog Wine Advocate, has made an impassioned reply. Since the discussion on Jancis’ site requires a password, I will only excerpt his first two paragraphs here and flag it for those with full access.

Granted, “terroir” may be one of the most irritatingly vague and slippery words in the wine growers’ and wine critic’s vocabulary. But it won’t remedy this to adopt Hugo Rose’s “dynamic definition of terroir” (The World of Fine Wine, Issue 7, 2005) ­ nor indeed the (very!) “broad” view advocated by Jonathan Swinchatt and David Howell (in this same issue) because, once one includes “cultural and historical perspectives” ­ let alone human decision making along with physically-describable situation, soil and microclimate, one is left with a concept so all-encompassing that it fails to mark any significant distinction.

That terroir, as Rose asserts, “is not a theory” appears too obvious to deserve mention, but that hardly warrants his conclusion that “terroir is, when you get down to it, just a story, nothing more.” It is not a theory any more than is “nature” (as opposed to “nurture”). But, like “nature”, it can mark an illuminating distinction, in this instance between anything that impinges on the flavour of a wine as a result of human decision or intervention in the course of that wine’s annual growing cycle, and all else. That “all else”, I submit,­ conspicuously excluding human volition, culture and history, comes down to weather (day-by-day meteorological variation) and terroir. Put a slightly different way, we want to distinguish between two sources of influence on the flavour of any given wine. On the one hand, there is the share of responsibility for resultant flavours that can be directly traced to human action, intentional, coincidental or accidental. On the other, there is anything that impinges on flavour over which the human agents who assume responsibility for growing and vinifying had no influence. The latter can be further subdivided into vintage-dependent meteorological conditions and “all other”, which is to say, “terroir”…more