Last month, scientists, professors, winemakers, journalists, and students gathered for three days at the University of California at Davis to try and put their finger on one of the wine world’s most ubiquitous and elusive topics: terroir. It seems like terroir is one of those topics where the more you talk about it, the more it eludes you, and this conference seemed designed to prove the rule.
UC-Davis is California’s preeminent winemaker training ground, and a place that has been traditionally and notoriously hostile to notions of terroir. Instead, the department of viticulture and oenology prefers to assign most of wine’s attributes to quantifiable recipes of flavor compounds, tannins, alcohol, phenols and the like, brought into balance and harmony by the winemaking skill. In short, at Davis the mysteries of viticulture have always been subsumed by the masters of vinification. That this conference took place at all in Davis is a victory of sorts for terroirists.
But the presenting scientists weren’t about to give up without something that resembled a fight. Many who participated seemed to grudgingly acknowledge the existence of terroir, but spent most of their energy flinging all kinds of skepticism at it. How they did this was worth a look.
Professor Warren Moran of the University of Auckland in New Zealand gave the keynote address, and he started with the definition of terroir to which we’ve all become accustomed: the imprint of soil, climate and aspect upon a wine. But he went on to show that terroir also is a social construct, that the environment’s effects on a wine’s typicity is detected, determined, maximized and ultimately marketed by those who decide it’s there. Its very existence is mediated by the people who interpret it and have it serve their ends. And as the French have learned, and subsequently taught the world, it is also an unbeatable marketing tool.
Models of wine quality are essentially a construct, ephemeral and cultural; vine behavior, however, is not. And much of these three days were taken up with rather abstruse presentations of data that described geological events great and small, subtle analyses of climate shifts, water and nutrient uptake, and the many other ways that vines find connection to the earth. But none of this gets told without a teller.
Even in California, a place where site expression has always seemed to take second place to warm climates and ripe wines, site matters, especially to winemakers. “We tell stories about the earth,” said Paul Draper, who has been mapping terroir from more than 20 sites for 40 years. Perhaps no one in California tells stories more eloquently.
So too does Dirk Hampson, who directs the winemaking at Nickel & Nickel, making wines from 25 different vineyards, mostly from Napa Valley — literally from the mountains to the sea. Hampson is a man willing to admit that he suffers from “multiple terroir disorder.” But in very practical terms he laid out the ways in which a winemaker must pay respect to the demands of place in the winery by comparing two cabernets from very different sites: one from Dragonfly Vineyard, on the valley floor in St. Helena, and one from Volk Vineyard, on Howell Mountain.
To achieve the mountain character of Volk, which comes into the winery with powerful tannins, Hampson does very little; at Dragonfly, however, he vigorously works his vats of fermenting grapes with long soaks, extended maceration and robust extraction. Tasting them, both were formidable, and both were completely different. “If Dragonfly was worked as gently as Volk,” said Hampson, “it would come out as a pale red gruel. And if Volk was worked as aggressively as Dragonfly, it would be a full frontal assault.” Which, then, was truer to its site?
You see, once you scratch the surface, you find that notions of terroir are full of such loopholes. What, ultimately, are we talking about when we extol the Oakville-ness of an Oakville cab? The place or the interpretation of place?
“We want the raw material to dictate what the wine will be,” said Draper, who thinks of himself as a steward for site expression, particularly when it comes to the old vineyards he works with. Perhaps it has more to do with some other yearning altogether, a sense of place that may be lacking in other beverages, or in other parts of our lives. “We all need that ‘somewhereness,’ ” said Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyards, one of this country’s most vocal terroirists. “We need that link to the natural world.”
Perhaps it’s why we drink the stuff, after all. In which case it probably doesn’t matter whether terroir is real or ephemeral, or to what extent it can be quantified. What matters is that we believe in it, and that we have to.