Terroir - Is it Important?

A couple nights ago it was my birthday and Valli took me to my favorite table in the Napa Valley. I’ve had meals there for three decades, though in different restaurant incarnations. The table is under a fig tree, next to a wood fired oven outside the door of Cindy’s Backstreet restaurant. We both decided to start things off with a glass of sherry and I picked a Manzanilla Fina. The distinct sea salty taste of Manzanilla brought back a memory, which I shared with Valli.

It was about a particular a lunch I shared over three decades ago with a friend, Darrell Corti, in a little café on the sandy beach of Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Looking out at the ocean from a table under a blood orange tree, we drank a crisp and salty Manzanilla with shellfish and perfectly grilled Sole. My Italian-American friend pointed out that we were only a short walk from the spot Columbus embarked on his third voyage to the New World. I then learned much about Columbus that I didn’t know (nor would I have guessed, anyone knew.) When we were informed the little café had no dessert, my friend asked if they would serve us an orange from the tree. The waiter answered in Spanish, “Yes, how would you like it served? Darrell thought for a moment, then responded, “Juiced!” And so there we sat, under the citrus tree finishing our meal and our conversation over a small glass of freshly picked, freshly squeezed, blood red juice of a Sanlúcar orange.

So what does this memory have to do with terroir? In my opinion, “Everything.” Had Valli and I chosen a Blanc de Blanc Champagne before dinner, the delicately toasty scent might have dredged up memories of a rock wall below an Inn overlooking Épernay, where Valli and I shared a bottle of Dom Ruinart in 1981 and minutes later, a proposal. Or if we had decided on the Sancerre, the citrus aroma and mineral taste would have harkened us back to two people, newly engaged, having a tail gate lunch along the side of the road in the Loire Valley.

Whether you call the tastes I describe above as terroir or something else, to many a wine lover, the taste of place is the added layer of nuance that gives depth to the appreciation of wine. It may not be of interest to the person to whom wine is simply something to wash down their food. But to a person who is disposed to learn, it is about exploration and memories. It’s knowing that you can revisit a place and re-live an experience by merely pulling or popping a cork.

For the winemaker, terroir has the same meaning as it does to any lover of wine, but there is something else. The winemaker’s view is on the inside of winemaking looking out. While a few might make wine only for themselves, most winemakers want to attract wine buyers like me. They want their wine to be distinctive; in fact, all winemakers would love for their wine to be identifiable. To accomplish this, they could do something to the wine with their own hands, employ some winemaking technique to make it distinct. For example, they might load the wine up with oak to make it stand out. But oak is available by the barrel or by the gallon of extract to anyone. The winemaker learns quickly that what they thought would make their wine distinct, actually makes the wine taste much like every other over-oaked wine. And tiresome to boot.

So they try promoting the complexity and subtle nuance of nature as a better course. They find better results than bold and obvious statements of their own. In making the single vineyard wine, the sensitive winemaker stays out of the way and only intercedes in the wine’s development where a choice allows the positive aspects of terroir to come through. Beyond the single vineyard wine, terroir is just as important in making a blend from several vineyards.

A winemaker who is tasked with making a wine from a range of vineyards finds that the thing they work with almost entirely in blending are individual vineyard terroirs. They separate their vineyards by lot and block in the winery and find they have a palette of colors, aromas and flavors. They find a path to a blend through these different lots that year after year provides consistency and individuality. This task is more difficult than making the single vineyard wine, because the winemaker not only has to bring the individual terroir of each vineyard along properly in the cellar, but has to find a way to weave them together in a consistent and distinctive manner.

I experienced exactly this task in making the blend for the top of the line Cabernet at Inglenook. At first it was quite easy. Blend the best lot or two of Cabernet from the singular vineyard in front of the Rutherford winery and add the nuances of a wonderful three acre block of Merlot that grew in its midst. But after a year or two when demand exceeded supply, I was under pressure to make more of the wine. To do that I had to bring in other vineyards while preserving to the extent I could, terroir and tradition. Fortunately, there were nearby growers like Joe Cohn, Charlie Wagner, Robin Lail and others with grapes of quality that helped me in that task.

To the owner of a vineyard on Spring Mountain, terroir is important for the reasons it is important to the wine lover and the winemaker. It is important for another reason, as well. Most of the individuals who own vineyards on Spring Mountain have been a success in another field. Yet they have come to an untamed place to carve out a vineyard in a challenging environment. They do it with a great deal of perspiration and expense. It is a great learning experience, especially watching the vineyard survive all that nature throws at it, watching it prosper and produce a distinctive product. To the vineyard owner it's rewarding that people buy their wine, but the fact that it shows flavor that is unique to place, bears witness to their effort. They don’t want it to taste like anyone else’s wine. The unique terror their vineyard expresses brings them the ultimate satisfaction.

When you spend time with wholesalers, restaurateurs, and retailers you find that most care about terroir for the same reasons as any lover of wine. Usually, that is what has brought them to the wine business. But for the wine trade, terroir can be important for esthetic and commercial reasons. The restaurateur, for example, doesn’t always pick a Cabernet because it sells. Often the wine is chosen because its individuality, the terroir that it expresses that more perfectly compliments the cuisine of the restaurant. Often a wine sells better, precisely because of how well it tastes with the food.

Given the importance of the nuance of terroir to the wine lover, the winemaker, the vineyard owner, and the wine trade; it is understandable why we make such a fuss about it. For me, I would have lost interest in the wine business long ago, if it wasn’t for terroir.

But does everyone buy into this? What do others have to say? What do you have to say?
I’ll share some observations on that next.

(The Manzanilla Fina is La Guita from Hijos de Rainera Pérez Marín, Sanlúcar. The photo of the wine cave is Spring Mountain Vineyard. The photo of the vineyard is the nine acre "Yverdon Vineyard" of Terra Valentine at 2000 ft. elevation)