It’s the ultimate whodunit in wine. Which puts the defining imprint on a wine – people or site? Or both? Welcome to one of the most enduring, impassioned and intriguing debates of modern times – whether or not a wine’s distinctive link to a particular place is more likely to be derived from human or natural influence.
Like all good debates, nobody can agree on the definition of terroir anyway. Not even the French, its most precious protagonists. In its simplest form of ‘gout de terroir’, it reflects a rarity in modern wine, a taste derived from its soil. Can happen, but not often. The more widely used traditional French expression for terroir – for which there is incidentally no precise equivalent word in English – relates to ‘the total natural environment of any viticultural site’, according to the Oxford Companion to Wine. According to this definition, terroir cannot be significantly influenced by management. Terroir relates to the natural characteristics and influences affecting a delineated area of land, such as slope, water supply, soil, aspect, and mesoclimate. The Oxford Companion goes on to say that ‘The holistic combination of all these is held to give each site its own unique terroir, which is reflected in its wines more or less consistently from year to year, to some degree regardless of variations in methods of viticulture and wine-making. Thus every small plot, and in generic terms every larger area, and ultimately region, may have distinctive wine-style characteristics which cannot be precisely duplicated elsewhere.’
On such logic is based much of the appellation concept witnessed today in its various forms throughout traditional Europe. However terroir is also, as noted by respected Burgundian wine merchant Louis Latour, ‘an excellent marketing tool’ for French winemakers. Away from the traditional vineyards of Europe there has been a recognition that the concept of terroir might contain a human element. One person who believes this is Warren Moran, Professor of Geography at the University of Auckland. Delivering the most pithy and topical address at the recent Pinot Noir New Zealand Conference in Wellington, Moran stated rather bluntly that ‘To attribute priority to the physical environment over the cultural is a mistake’. He prefers the word ‘typicite’, ‘the distinctiveness of a wine from a particular place’.
Because it’s the most closely classified piece of agricultural dirt on planet earth, because its wines are made from pinot noir which it has grown for at least six hundred years, because it’s relatively small and its best wines fetch astronomic prices and come from incredibly small vineyards, the Cote d’Or of Burgundy is usually held up as the wine region which most clearly demonstrates the validity and significance of the old-fashioned definitions of terroir. Burgundy’s most prized vineyards, especially those given Grand Cru status, are those most likely to produce the best wines in both great and poor growing seasons. Furthermore, it is the Grand Cru and Premier Cru wines that lend most weight when defining the typicite of an appellation (sub-region). Warren Moran claims that Burgundy is itself anything but a natural landscape. Over the centuries its soils have been re-engineered, its rocks crushed and its soil profiles and subsoils altered. The strongest protagonists of the traditional terroir argument cite soil drainage as one of the key indices of what constitutes terroir, yet few wine regions could boast such an extensively planned and adapted drainage system as Burgundy itself. Who’s become involved? Humans, that’s who. ‘Viticulturists have modified all the physical processes influencing the vine – even in Burgundy’, says Moran.
One of the heroes of New Zealand’s emergent pinot noir industry is Dr Neil McCallum, who uses an artificial reflective mulch to increase the radiation and temperatures in the fruit zone of his canopies at his Dry River vineyard at Martinborough. McCallum is a champion of Martinborough’s terroir, yet he’s quite prepared to adapt it to suit his own needs.
The French approach to terroir is that almost irrespective of grape variety or how it is treated, wine is nothing but a reflection of its terroir: the winemaker virtually becomes irrelevant. Before winemakers began to experiment with such variables as the significant use of different types of new oak, stalk content, different percentages of solids, whole berries and whole bunches, they would virtually shun their own roles. Older, lighter styles of Burgundy, for example, were defended as being more reflective of terroir, while in reality they were often devoid of fruit expression and reflective of an outdated approach considered by today’s best makers to be lazy and laissez-faire. The concept of terroir held back progress by imposing a limitation on the expectations of winemakers, retarding the removal of poor clones and lesser varieties, while providing an excuse not to correct under-worked soils and vineyards.
The appellation systems of Europe have only just began to deal with makers of wines considered to be ‘too good’ or else of ‘the wrong variety’ for their site. While the modern accent towards lower-cropped, riper and more intense fruit, better oak and cleaner winemaking is still considered by some to prevent terroir from shining through, there’s little doubt it has partially obscured differences that were once attributed to terroir. If anything, today’s best are in effect becoming less ‘Burgundian’, to subscribe to the outdated interpretation of the term. On the other hand, better winemaking and viticulture is now exposing differences between wines grown in marginally differing circumstances. Terroir is clearly a two-edged sword. Moran makes the point that when Burgundian winemakers get access to vineyards outside the communes from whose vineyards they have traditionally made wine, they often struggle to achieve the typicite expected of the commune whose fruit they are working with for the first time. It might take them several seasons to align their winemaking techniques with other makers whose wines might better express this typicite. Terroir is what ultimately makes it possible, but winemaking as well as viticulture can be superimposed directly over the top of it.
A maker’s stamp will show through regardless of where the fruit is grown. In 1992 Coldstream Hills and Tarrawarra each swapped some pinot noir and made wine from the other’s fruit. The two wines tasted significantly different from their usual style, though typical of each maker. Most Burgundian vineyards are owned by a number of different domaines. If the winemaker’s role was as irrelevant as the terroirists would suggest, how would it be possible to identify a domaine style amid a range of wines from the same vineyard but from different makers? Yet it’s clearly possible to do so.
By the same token, it’s also possible to link together certain qualities and characters in wines from the same regions, communes or sub-regions. Typicite is undisputed and so is the influence of terroir. But it is clearly just one factor in shaping a wine.
An outspoken supporter of the ‘interventionist’ approach to terroir is New Zealand viticulturist Steve Smith. ‘Vineyard management will differ from year to year with the smart growers. In warm years, leaf removal and more canopy density is employed to retain acidity, while irrigation becomes important to keep the vine alive and prevent stress. Soil and climate are important, but don’t forget the contribution of the vigneron to terroir – it may well be the difference!’ he argues.
Warren Moran believes that the French have used the concept of terroir to justify bad wines from poor years and to create a barrier between their wines and those from other countries. He says ‘The people of the industry, their unique characters, their experience, their relationships with others, and their travails and successes in growing grapes and making wines in their particular environments have produced the industry we know today. Without people and wine the word terroir would not exist.’
