It has been a couple of decades since we’ve been asked to take on faith the concept that a great wine is one that a self-proclaimed expert perceives it to be without any evidence whatever of the essential components of the wine being there.

The recent definition of a great wine has been based on concentration and weight and has nothing to do with the two most vital aspects of the characteristics of a truly great wine: varietal definition and regional typicity. We all know that it’s possible to make a dark, heavy wine by manipulation, but who ever said that that trait, in and of itself, was a prerequisite for a wine being great -- and the only significant criterion for making that claim?

One thing I learned when I first got into wine was that if you bought a Cabernet Sauvignon, it wasn’t a good wine if it didn’t smell and taste something like Cabernet Sauvignon. For it to be even successful and drinkable, let alone a classic, it had to smell and taste like the grape on the label. Soon after, I read about the importance of regional character, and although it wasn’t defined in quite as specific a way as was varietal character, the idea was simple: not only was a great wine true to its grape heritage, but it would show some sense of the place from which it came.

In fact, as I learned from talking with those who owned the greatest wineries, a truly great wine could not be simply more of the same thing; the great wines all had their own unique distinctiveness that came from their vineyards.

This “home-soil character” could be obvious or subtle, but without a trace of it, the wine was somehow lacking, they all said. I heard this directly from the master, California’s greatest wine maker, Andre Tchelistcheff, when he described the “Rutherford dust” element in his top Cabernets. I heard it from numerous French vintners who trekked to this country in the 1970s when I was forming the base of wine knowledge that eventually led to a career in this game.

Thus was terroir fixed in my mind as inextricably linked to great wine. Which has led, for me, to an axiom that ought to be in every wine lover’s mind’s eye: no wine can ever truly be described as great without some elements of both varietal intensity and terroir character.

We who believe in terroir take a lot on faith. Those who completely detest and dismiss the idea of terroir say it is blind faith to accept it as a fact. And thus you can see where the twain never shall agree. I call these people simplists because they seem to revel in the utter uniformity of all wines they deem to be great.

We realize that the concept of terroir itself is not easy to grasp: that the grape varietal has an equal and vitally important companion, which is the essence of what the region brings to it. That equalizer is the soil, the very plot of ground where the wine grapes grow, along with the air in which it thrives and the weather patterns that typically affect that air. Terroir even plays a role in bizarre vintages, such as 2003 in Europe when a massive heat wave plagued the continent. It is this theory of terroir that says that the soil and weather have as much of an influence as does the variety of grape.

What makes this concept so hard to grasp is that there is no direct parallel in other fruits and vegetables. An Early Girl tomato grown in Bakersfield smells and tastes pretty much the same as the same variety of tomato grown in Ukiah, even if one is grown hydroponically and the other is grown in soil. Or does it? One key point here is that no one ever stages a blind tasting of Early Girl tomatoes from different regions or growing conditions. If someone did actually stage a tasting of Early Girl tomatoes from different growing regions, would there be a significant difference in how they smelled and tasted? Or would the differences be trivial? Or would there be no essential difference at all?

But we do, seemingly, stage all sorts of blind tastings of just about every wine on the planet. That’s how we can know that a Musigny is more like another Musigny than it is like a Corton. On the other hand, with some reviewers, the “best” Musigny is one that is weighty. A more elegant version would be marked down, and a more weighty Corton would be marked up. So much for terroir.

As for the tomato analogy, it may be that the soil does impart a special character to all sorts of other plants, and we simply haven’t seen it at this point. How many professional tomato tasters are there? (And, more to the point, does it matter? Even if there were a significant difference between two tomatoes of the same variety growing in differing regions, would one be worth intrinsically more than the other? Tomatoes are a commodity, and the market sets a price based on the volume of tomatoes available, not generally on quality and certainly not on regionality.)

(The only area of vegetables I am aware of in which this seems to be an issue is with onions. Walla Walla, Maui, or Vidalia onions are three regionally prominent kinds of onions that are sweeter than others.)

Back to wine: if terroir does exist, as so many people say it does, then it is obvious that it competes with varietal character for the dominant feature in a wine’s basic sensory elements. If this is so, which is more important, the regional or the varietal? This is a lot knottier of a question for philosophers than it is for wine purists.

Clearly, the French, notably in regions like Bordeaux and Burgundy, believe that terroir is an essential element in the makeup of a wine, else they would not rely so heavily on naming wines for regions rather than varietals. A high-caliber Bordeaux can be mostly Merlot (Petrus), mostly Cabernet Sauvignon (Mouton), or a mix in which no variety tops 50% (Pichon Lalande).

However, there appears to be a huge paradox here: if the French so firmly believed in the power of terroir to imprint on the wines of each of the prestigious growing regions, why on earth did they restrict the grapes that may be grown in them? They didn’t, after all, limit the grapes of “lesser” regions such as Provence.

If the concept of terroir existed before the quest to limit the grapes for quality reasons, and the French knew instinctively that terroir was more important than varietal character, then the burgers of Bordeaux would have had no need to limit the grapes grown there to those that today are mandated. Pinot Noir would have been permitted, I believe, because to restrict it would have been to buy into the notion that terroir was really only a myth, and to uphold the notion of regional character, the grapes had to be limited to those that produced a certain anticipated character.

To use a more extreme example, if terroir were so compelling an idea, why did the French need to restrict the grape varieties of Montrachet to Chardonnay? They could very well have argued, “Terroir defines a character in every wine that emanates from a particular soil and growing region, so it matters little which grapes grow here. So we will permit any grape to grow here, because the character of the resulting wine will reflect the soil at least as much as the varietal does.” And thus they could well have permitted Riesling to grow in Montrachet, with their faith in terroir giving them the confidence that the resulting wine would be reflective more of Montrachet, the region, than of the grape or grapes that made the wine. We know from numerous examples out of Germany that the Riesling grape is one of the best gauges of regionality. As a transparent look into the soil, Riesling gives us floral Mosels, earthy Rheingaus, minerally Pfalzes and so forth.

For a brief exploration into terroir, let’s use Alsace as a test case. Is there a unique character to all the white wines of Alsace that exceed the character of the varietals planted there? I suppose one could argue that there is; that a Domaine Weinbach Pinot Gris and a Gewurztraminer from the same property are closer to exhibiting a local “flavor” than a Weinbach Pinot Gris and a Pinot Grigio from Alois Lageder of Alto-Adide. Both wines are from cooler regions.

That, however, is a pretty long reach to justify the existence of terroir. Gewurztraminer is so strongly aromatic a grape, and Pinot Gris is only mildly spicy. If you were to stage a blind tasting of all three of the above wines, would not the two Pinot Gris seem more alike than the two Weinbach wines? I’d wager they would. Here varietal character trumps terroir.

But there are elements of regionality (such as acid, pH, and other minerality issues; see below) that link other disparate wines.

I support the notion of the existence of terroir since I have seen it often enough to verify its presence in many wines. A tasting of Sauvignon Blancs from the Loire shows the differences, slight though they may be, between Pouilly-Fume and Sancerre. And the French adherence to this notion may be a chicken-and-egg sort of proposition. However, for better or worse it explains much about how the French justify calling certain characteristics elements of greatness in certain wines when they are (seemingly) limited to certain regions.

A key point here is that for many wine critics, terroir is either a good thing or a whipping boy. It works like this: a number-scoring critic occasionally finds an assertive element of terroir, such as the pyrazine-y green pepper-y note in a Central Coast Pinot Noir. He or she then marks this wine down for that element; “it’s weedy” or “it’s stemmy.” So the characteristic is seen as a negative. Unless, that is, the wine is very expensive. Then the wine has a regionally distinctive nose!

At a conference on Terroir in 2000, Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Winery gave a speech in which he listed the enemies of terroir. There were more than a dozen. I spoke with Grahm recently about his passion for wines of distinction and regional authenticity, and he noted that the New World syndrome has left the new American wine consumer with little that is truly distinctive any more. We are, he said (and I paraphrase) making wines that are all so similar to one another because wine makers are shooting for scores, not character.

“New world palates are easily fooled, and we have been fooled for a long time with wines that are very soft and simple,” said Grahm. “They like juicy, fruity, exuberant wines that don’t require any thinking. Old world palates kind of like fruit, too, but they prefer restrained wines with less extraction, lower alcohol and wines that have a certain minerality -- what you get when you have a wine with regional character.”

Grahm’s list of the enemies of terroir include ultra-late harvesting, excessive alcohol, use of new oak, high pH levels and a lot more. Most exasperating is the trend toward later harvesting of red grapes, which leaves me with the feeling that the wine in question is closer to port and raisins, a truly artificial taste. By the time they get the grapes in, gone is the varietal intensity, and long gone is the terroir.

This trend has happened somewhat slowly over the last 15 years, surreptitiously creeping up on many wine makers and allowing them to justify their “new” style of wine by arguing that things haven’t changed radically over the years. To be sure, if you pick Cabernet at 24 brix in 1990 and pick only one-tenth of a percentage point higher each year, by 2000 you’re at 25 brix. Duh.

And whoever said that 22.5° to 23° brix was going to make lousy wine? We did it for decades and made great wines. I have dozens of wines in my cellar from the 1970s that are all still sensational. (And a lot of the vaunted 1997s are now over the hill.) But the concept of “great” wine back 20 years ago, for example, was radically different from our collective perception of what the term means today. Back then, wine lovers relished the “eucalyptus-y” character in Heitz Martha’s Vineyard and Johnson-Turnbull Cabernets, BV Private Reserve’s Rutherford Dust, the silky character of Stag’s Leap, the mountain concentration of Mayacamas.

Today, ultra-ripe is best. So is ultra-oaky, not to mention 15% alcohol, lower acid, higher pH, and even (heaven help us) a touch of sugar!

This is the International Style of wine so popular these days that even Chablis makers employ tactics to make their wines in a manner that will gain them precious points, sacrificing the nervy minerality of the past that Grahm so cherishes. And such wines are made to be soft, lush, “hedonistic,” and lacking any of the verve so necessary for a wine to exhibit its regional features.

There is no question that the way the American palate has been trained (by the numbers, from a 100-point scale) for the last generation, that tart, crisp wine doesn’t sell very well any more. Nor does any wine described as a “food wine.” Or any wine that has the descriptors “sublime,” “subtle,” or “elegant” attached to it.

But for the terroirists, there is a huge difference between wimpy and sublime, and wines of real character, notably those with perfect terroir components, can be far more classic than some clumsy, raisiny/porty, overly weighty wine whose main aim is to impress, not necessarily to please. And certainly is not aimed at the dinner table as much as the tasting table.

And make no mistake: the wines of the last decade that are getting all the accolades, high scores, and attention from newby collectors are not solely products of the vineyard. They are man-made, and do not avoid the problems of man’s tinkering.

There is an old Aussie saying that to make great wine, get great grapes and don’t trip on the mat. We have known for decades that the more you do to a wine, on the vine and in the winery, the less it can deliver what Mother Nature put into it and which Father Time can only enhance.

Full malolactic fermentations on Chardonnay (and even Pinot Gris!), color additions, double oaking, and more are the tactics of those seeking a high score.

These are tactics of manipulation that wreak chaos with the endemic elements, and rob a wine of the essential elements of varietal and terroir.

And without either, I contend, it is impossible to have a classic wine. And without both, can you even have a wine that’s drinkable?

Sadly, the answer is yes -- for those newcomers to wine who have been trained to like obviousness, homogeneity, and simplicity. It is truly sad that this is a large part of what’s deemed to be great in wine today.

Which is why a quest for terroir elements that define the character of a region, and thus of its wines, is so vital to our understanding of great wines’ second and third dimensions, something no solitary number can ever do.

~ Dan Berger, Sonoma Editor


To comment on Dan Berger’s writings and thoughts, contact him at d.berger@appellationamerica.com