From discussions of terroir, to the distinction between natural and industrial wine, the wine world is full of gray areas, says David Schildknecht. We should be careful to avoid the trap of simplistic, black-and-white thinking.
Intemperate rhetoric and immodest semantics have an unfortunate way of blinkering or locking in people’s perceptions. This is nowhere better illustrated than in contemporary talk about wine. Take the practice of self-described natural-wine growers to define their approach in opposition to “conventional winemaking”—as if that category were not even more difficult to define by a set of practices than “natural winemaking.” An even more popular bogeyman, not confined to natural-wine proponents, is “industrial winemaking.” To be sure, the sheer scale and methods employed sometimes render that expression apt. But the Manichean tendencies of much contemporary discourse—implying that “wines of terroir” and “industrial wines” are not just mutually exclusive but also collectively exhaustive categories—must be rejected. That a wine is fermented with cultured yeasts, receives enzymatic additions, and is both fined and filtered by no means precludes its recognition by taste as having originated in a certain place.
Driven to associate their approach with expression of terroir, many advocates of “less is more” try to distance themselves from what they perceive as viticulture and winemaking focused on style. Take, for example, Stephen Hagen, a partisan of regenerative, “grazing-based” viticulture whose Antiquum Farm wines from Oregon’s Willamette Valley are certainly meritoriously distinctive: “We see style as erosive to the pursuit of authentic wine displaying uncompromised character. We place ultimate trust in the farm to provide the unique expression of [place].” But one is surely not misusing “style”—nor has Hagen any control over this—to describe and distinguish finished wines, very much including those of Antiquum Farm. And it is hard to see how the inevitable decisions involved in pruning, canopy management, and harvest date can be made without an eye to the eventual vinous results—or, if this were possible, why any wine grower would desire it.
Terroir is even more frequently associated by self-described seekers with a sublimation of varietal expression or of flavors that can be subsumed under “fruit.” But neither a dichotomy of “fruity” with “savory” nor of “fruity” with “mineral” is well defined or mutually exhaustive. And to insist that terroir differences never cash out in terms of fruit flavors is a prejudice contradicted by gustatory evidence.
Related
Ignoring ignorance
Much of the exaggeration exhibited in discourse about wines masks our ignorance of what contributes to their taste. Attempts to account for differences in flavor that vary according to soil and site—differences critical to how growers and enthusiasts down the centuries have interpreted wine, yet whose very existence is widely questioned in the geological community—confront a frustrating paucity of scientific research. And where there is research, results often confound popular assumptions. Consider, for instance, a recently widespread association of organic viticulture and low-intervention vinification with terroir via yeasts.
Less physical or chemical intervention in one’s soil means greater diversity of microflora to influence vine nutrition and metabolism. Less intervention in one’s must—in particular, no application of SO2—means that a diversity of yeast species that one’s vineyard and soil management have encouraged can play a significant, albeit evanescent, role in fermentation. That such vineyard and cellar restraints should lead to greater distinctiveness in the resulting wines is not merely plausible; it is supported by overwhelming testimony of wine growers and skilled professional tasters.
But to suggest that such observations support the notion of terroir character as traditionally conceived—what wine growers, wine journalists, and wine promoters generally have in mind when they refer to “sense of place,” origine, or Herkunft—represents a huge and (as yet at least) unwarranted evidential leap. The microfloral population of a vineyard might, for instance, be a function less of its geological underpinnings than of the specific cover crops that grow (or don’t) between its rows. And not only might microbiological differences be highly localized—that is, not something that tracks with cadastral, named vineyard, or cru designations, much less entire appellations—there is in fact recent evidence of extreme localization.
Content from our partners
Fred Merwarth of Finger Lakes pioneer Hermann J Wiemer Vineyard offers a succinct and familiar justification for his viticultural approach, in particular his ongoing transition from cultured yeasts to spontaneous fermentation: “We’re aiming to more completely express the site, by doing as little as possible to influence the wine.” But studies supported by Cornell University’s renowned Viticulture & Enology program revealed that each individual vineyard block at Wiemer brought its own highly distinctive array of yeasts to the fermentative task. Moreover, close proximity of blocks was not reflected in greater similarity of active yeast populations. (Of course, even the notion of microfloral populations resulting in parcel expression would be invalidated if those populations varied significantly from one growing season to another; but the Wiemer-Cornell project revealed minimal vintage variation.)
It’s a remarkable fact that at least some experienced tasters can identify a wine’s region, commune, or named vineyard of origin. But is there any indication that this has become easier due to self-conscious low intervention? Is, say, the distinction between Côte-Rôtie and Cornas any more frequently, clearly, or strikingly exhibited by wines of today than it was during the heyday of Marius Gentaz and Noël Verset; or between Niersteiner Orbel and Niersteiner Hipping than when Alexander Michalsky and Franz Karl Schmitt were cellar masters? That’s an open question. The opposite might even be true.
