In the worlds of wine and food, the French word terroir is on everyone’s lips. But what do they mean by it? Or, to put it more accurately, what can they possibly mean by it?
Literally, terroir means soil. The dictionaries all agree. But French winegrowers have applied the term to the effect of land, which is to say the geographical location of vineyards and wine regions, on wine quality, however defined. That is why the legal classification of French wines (appellation controlee) is geographical, instead of being organized by grape variety or some other characteristic more closely connected with the wine itself. This land-based principle of classification is scientifically indefensible and clearly intended to assist the marketing of wines.
If soil and other geographical qualities of a vineyard were unique indicators of the identity of a wine (all other things being equal: vinification methods, skill of the vintner, vineyard budgets, etc.), then wines from vineyards geographically separate from each other but with identical soil and climatic conditions would, by definition have the same “terroir” in every fundamental sense except the essentially trivial one of name and map position. In other words, the wines of the Medoc subregion of Bordeaux would have the same terroir as those of the North Fork of Island, which are commonly held to be very similar in soil and climate. Although this would be a logical consequence of a rational definition of terroir, it would strike almost anyone, including me, as a preposterous distortion of “terroir’s” meaning, which is to connect a specific land area, ideally a single vineyard, or even a hillside, with the wine produced from it. But this usage is unscientific, as I have shown. Its sole rational justification is to aid and simplify the difficult business of selling and buying wine.
The reputation and prestige of Medoc wines is based on their highly promoted geographical origin. Yet innumerable blind tastings have shown that the wines themselves cannot be reliably distinguished from wines made outside the Medoc, even wines from different grapes.
Not only, then, is terroir a slippery and unreliable term for appreciating wine (and even more so when applied to other food products), but its history should make us wary of using it altogether (except perhaps in plainspoken references in French to soil itself). Anyone familiar with the history of fascism will recall the sinister way in which mystical terms like race and blood and soil have been deployed to fire people up and mobilize their energies against other people held to be outsiders and enemies of “native” races, blood and the ineffable virtue of having sprung from the local soil. I was reminded of this reading a review of the new Pleiade edition of the works of the French fascist writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle in the Times literary Supplement (Jan. 25 2013).
The reviewer Nicholas Hewitt writes of Drieu la Rochelle’s “belief in ‘national energy’,…stemming from France’s terroir, and which was to lead him to virulent anti-Semitism.”
Worth thinking about the next time you start rhapsodizing about the effect of terroir on a glass of Burgundy or an artisanal salami.
