Does your wine have a sense of place?

Wine Matters

By Greg O'Byrne | For The New Mexican

9/16/2008

There's a moment in the 1995 movie French Kiss where Meg Ryan — flying to France to confront her straying fiancé — becomes smitten with the French crook she meets on the plane, played by Kevin Kline.

Alone in Kline's parent's village home in Provence she connects with his passion for wine. From small vials in a wine-aroma kit, he persuades her to identify scents that are indicative of the wines produced in his region. One by one, she correctly identifies rosemary, thyme, wet stones, earth, crushed Provençal herbs. The wines from his family's vineyards have these aromas, he explains, this sense of place — exhibiting a terroir, to use the French word. He smiles in this, their first connection; she smiles back with her famous curled-end smile and romance fills the screen.

Perhaps because it has the same prefix as the Latin word terra, meaning earth, terroir is often confused with soil — but it is so much more than that. Simply put, terroir in wine refers to a sense of place — the elements of soil, climate, grape, slope, exposure and the imprint, or non-imprint, of man — in the growing environment .

Terroir is what makes cabernet franc grown in the Loire Valley taste different than cabernet franc grown in Bordeaux. Or what makes Grand Cru Burgundy from the middle of the slope in the Côte D'Or taste different from Premier Cru Burgundy from a few meters down the same slope. Each place has a particular combination of soil, climate and exposure that makes a different imprint on the same grape.

Does the wine in your glass have the taste and imprint of the place where it is grown or does it have the taste and imprint of the technique of a winemaker? International-style wines — wines made in the cellar rather than the vineyard — are wines that can erase terroir, wines that express techniques performed in the cellar more than the growing environment or place.

Grapes that have been picked over-ripe in the vineyard and treated to techniques in the cellar such as reverse osmosis, acidification, micro-oxygination, high extraction and high oak result in big, chewy, dark wines with sweet tannins, high alcohol and toasty oak. These same techniques applied to different grapes grown oceans apart can make Italy's Chianti Classico taste no different than a Napa cabernet sauvignon. What a crime!

I love the infinite variety of wine with a sense of place — the forest floor quality of a good pinot from Burgundy, the white pepper and refined black fruit of a syrah from the Northern Rhône, the cedar-box and pencil-shaving aromas of a good Bordeaux, the horse-saddle funk of mourvedre from Bandol, the violets and licorice of a nebbiollo from Piemonte, the dried wild strawberry of a sangiovese from Chianti Classico and the dusty red cherries of a pinot noir from Oregon's Dundee Hills.

There are seven days in the week and we have the ability to celebrate each for its own virtue. Wines should taste different from one another — and taste as if they come from a specific place. What would be the point otherwise?

Celebrating natural wines

Alice Feiring — wine author, wine blogger, leading propenent of natural wine and author of this year's popular book The Battle for Wine and Love, or How I Save the World from Parkerization — says, "(w)inemakers like to say wine is grown in the vineyard, but more and more wine is grown in the lab." She bemoans the trend for big wines that are manipulated in the cellar to wow the critics and get the scores, wines that are over-extracted, over-oaked and blow you over with one glass. These cocktail wines have their use, but she prefers wines of finesse and elegance, natural wines that exhibit a sense of place.

Wikipedia defines "natural wine" as a wine made with as little chemical and technological intervention as possible, either in the way the grapes are grown or the way they are made into wine. The term is used to distinguish such wine from wine that is organic. Wine might be organic in the sense of having been made from organically grown grapes, but it still could be subject to technical manipulation in the winemaking process.

The concept of natural wine is controversial, particularly in the English-speaking world. Many critics reject it as bogus or misleading. There is no established certification body and the term has no legal status. Winemakers who describe themselves as making natural wine often differ in what they consider to be an acceptable level of intervention.

Most definitions of natural wine include some or all of the following: hand-picked, organically or biodynamically grown grapes; low-yielding vineyards, no added sugars, no foreign yeasts, no fining or filtration, no adjustments for acidity, no other additives for mouth-feel or color, no micro-oxygenation or reverse osmosis, and little or no added sulphite.

I asked Feiring about natural wine. "The reason I jumped on the bandwagon of vin naturel," she said, "is that after a few years of constant tasting and becoming more and more discouraged, I looked at my notes and realized there was a common thread; my favorites were all made pretty naturally, with nothing added except perhaps a splash of S02 and sometimes none.

"What draws me to them is the taste, not any sort of moral stance; they simply taste better to me and a very controlled wine, poked and prodded into submission, can never give me the kind of goose bumps that a wine full of life can. A wine that is yeasted, enzymed, oaked, tannined, dealked, deacidified, reacidified and micro-oxed just can't get me excited."

Neal Rosenthal, author of another of my favorite wine books published this year, Reflections of a Wine Merchant, says that wine is "a creature of geographical origin."

Named Importer of the Year in this months's Food & Wine Magazine, Rosenthal is a proponent of western European wines — and an unapologetic basher of New World wines.

Rosenthal argues for the importance of a wine's expression of terroir and is passionate in his declaration that "the most satisfying of wines reveal their characters slurp by slurp as they speak of their origins and their traditions. The best of wines," he says, "always proudly tell you from where they came."

Randall Grahm, witty wine writer, unconventional winemaker and owner of one of California's most innovative wineries, Bonny Doon, has been in a self-described search for terroir in North America for most his adult life. While he declares that terroir may not exist in America, he also confesses, "I am utterly persuaded that there is no other way to produce great wine — a compelling personal inspiration — apart from planting a vineyard from scratch with the intention of expressing the terroir of the site." The vineyard represents Grahm's spiritual path, he says — perhaps the only shot he'll have at bringing balance into his life.

I would disagree with Rosenthal and argue that terroir, though it may not have fully shown itself yet, does exist and will show itself more in North America. Randall Grahm's single-vineyard riesling wines from Washington state are one example; pinot noir from Oregon is another.

Robert Haas, an owner of Tablas Creek Vineyard, believes in terroir in North America. Partners with the Perrin brothers of Chateau Beaucastel, one of the southern Rhône's best Chateaunuef du Papes, Haas started importing vines from the famous Beaucastel vineyard 20 years ago, and grafting them onto rootstock in limestone soils on the western slopes of Paso Robles. These mourvedre, grenache noir and syrah vines are vinified together to make a Chateauneuf-style red wine worthy of the name Esprit du Beaucastel. Following a natural winemaking process, the philosophy at Tablas Creek is to hand-harvest and ferment each variety separately, using native yeast for fermentation and neutral French oak barrels to preserve the wines' ties to their soil, climate and varietal character.

Natural wine seminar Sept. 24

One of the most topical —and perhaps one of my favorite — events at this year's Santa Fe Wine & Chile Fiesta is the afternoon wine seminar Sept. 24, where these four personalities — the Author, The Importer, the Winemaker and the Owner — will come together for one hour to discuss natural wine. Each will present two wines, and participants can judge as to whether or not the wines in their glasses have a sense of place.