Terroir
excerpted and modified from my original posts, Musings on Making Wine Part 1 and Terroir of Eden from bookandbottlestpete.com.
Terroir is one of those finicky French words that doesn’t have a great translation in English. Terroir includes the climate, the weather, the soil, the microbiome of a place, the surrounding vegetation, and so much more. Terroir is important because it causes grapes grown in one place to have a different character than grapes grown in another. This is why people pay more for a Cabernet that comes from Napa than from other places, for example. Marketing wise, it’s also important - if you’re a winery on an excellent plot of land with superior terroir, you want you potential consumers to know it, which is why wine growing regions designate particular places that are united in their sense of terroir to create appellations of controlled origin or AVAs (American Viticultural Areas) as we call them here in the states. These AVAs can be large swaths of land - Napa makes a different kind of wine than Paso Robles, for example - but they can also be tiny. In the Napa Valley AVA, for example, there are sixteen tiny AVAs, including some you may have heard of: Rutherford, Stags Leap District, and Mt. Veeder. That means that there’s something specific about each of those designated areas that if you make wine only from those tiny regions, an experienced taster can distinguish between them.
Let’s start at a big scale and move our way in, using California as our example. Most broadly, we have California wine - that means the grapes inside can hail from multiple places in California. They can still be good grapes, and the wine making can still be well done, but it’s going to taste more the way the winemaker wants rather than being a specific reflection of the place. Going down a level, you have Monterey County. This now describes an area with a climate and geography that is markedly different from other places in California, like Napa or Sonoma County, for instance. In Monterey County, you have vineyards that are adjacent to Monterey Bay as well as deep into the Salinas Valley. It makes sense that those grapes would grow differently and develop different characteristics. Even more narrowly, we have the Arroyo Seco AVA which is a smaller designation within Monterey County. Arroyo Seco is known for its much cooler climate than other parts of Monterey, which gives the lightness and earthiness to the First Row Pinot Noir. Finally, we make to the individual vineyard or in this case row of a vineyard. You can get even more specific: the first row of vines in the Panorama Vineyard that receive the strongest winds coming over the hills. Now you know why the First Row Pinot Noir would taste different from one of Carmel Road’s other Pinot Noirs from another part of Monterey County or from a Pinot Noir from somewhere else entirely.
Terroir also includes the soil that the vines grow in. Here in Arroyo Seco in Monterey County, the soil is gravelly, sandy loam. The gravel holds the heat from the sun overnight so the grapes don’t freeze on the vine, the sand allows the water to drain through quickly which forces the vines to struggle, putting more energy into creating rich fruit than lots of leaves. The loam has a slightly alkaline chemistry which helps keep the acidity in the grapes which gives the wine structure and balance.
You could spend a lifetime learning about terroir through climatology, geology, geography, botany, and microbiology.You may also find yourself finding favorite places for certain wines that you like because you know they’ll share a characteristic that is called terroir.
On a recent winemaking internship, I was fortunate to get to taste through a bunch of barrels in their cellar which made it clear to me why wineries choose to produce single vineyard wines. Yes, you can certainly manipulate a wine in the cellar to have certain characteristics, but how cool is it that the terroir of a certain vineyard - the microclimate, the grape clone, the aspect - make fruits that taste so different from each other. In a world of grocery store culture where any Gala apple tastes like a Gala apple, it’s amazing to taste such a remarkable difference between two grapes of the same variety that only were separated by a couple of miles. Winemakers often blend different vineyards and different clones to get a larger batch of more consistent juice - this year adding more of the tannic vineyard, next year needing a bit more of the tart acidity of another. Most of the wine people drink every day is like this - a sampling of vineyards from across a region. But, on a special occasion when you have the ability to upgrade to a single vineyard wine, know that you’re tasting the actual terroir from that place that the grapes once grew.
The same flavors you could taste in the live grapes from a particular vineyard and the same qualities you could discern from the fermenting vats of those same grapes led to identifiable nuances in the barrel. It’s impossibly mind-blowing to me.
