A Natural History of Wine by Ian Tattersall
Author:Ian Tattersall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-08-14T16:00:00+00:00
8
The Reign of Terroir
Wine and Place
From the road that winds north through the vineyards from Chagny toward Beaune, you’d hardly notice the low, vine-clad ridge that runs across the near horizon. Known as Mont Rachaz when first recorded as a vineyard in 1252, this is as unremarkable a stretch of landscape as you’ll see anywhere in Burgundy. But the wines! The thin layer of limestone intermixed with limy muds that coats the hillside has produced the most spectacular wine-growing terroir anywhere in the world. Years ago, when mere mortals could—very occasionally—afford it, we guiltily splurged on a bottle produced from the Montrachet vineyard. We are still trying vainly to recapture the magic of the moment when we tasted it.
Pity the surface of our planet. It has been constantly battered by the elements since time began. The assault is less dramatic today than it was four billion years ago, during the Late Heavy Bombardment, when asteroids were constantly assailing the newly solidified crust, as the planet mopped up the smaller debris left over in its orbit from the formation of the solar system. But even in today’s calmer conditions Earth’s surface is under attack daily. Diurnal and seasonal heating and cooling cycles make the continental rocks expand, contract, and crack, while wind and water are constantly eroding them. These merciless forces remove particles from existing rocks and transport them to places of deposition on land or out to sea, where they accumulate. On land the accumulating sediments rapidly become colonized by a vast array of organisms, inaugurating the formation of soils: incredibly complex products of nature that vary hugely from place to place, even over short distances, as the result of intricate interactions among the minerals constituting the rocks, particle sizes, and a plethora of organic influences. And it is with the resulting variety of soils that the concept of terroir begins. Every French speaker instinctively finds a profound meaning in this term, but it becomes curiously elusive when one seeks to translate it into English.
As far as wines are concerned, terroir refers most fundamentally to the qualities of any place where grapes are grown. These qualities start with the local bedrock, soils, and drainage, but expand to include such features as slope, exposure, microclimate, altitude, and latitude, along with many other attributes, including the remarkably varying microbial communities we described in Chapter 6. And even after accounting for all those variables we have not explained terroir, because the concept carries resonating echoes of history as well. In addition to physical and biological elements, it also embraces culture and tradition: how local vine-growing and winemaking practices that have evolved over centuries have affected the eventual product of each individual patch of earth. More abstractly, terroir includes the genius loci, that spirit we sense in any magical place.
All in all, then, a wine’s terroir is complex and multidimensional, ensuring that every wine in the world is produced under conditions that differ, however subtly or extravagantly, from those in which other wines are grown and made.
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