One top drinks writer launches an attack on the wine trade that, he says, exploits the myth of the soil to justify obscene prices and reams of poppycock.
Terroir is the belief that vineyards make wines, not humankind. But this is just a fantasy. Let me explain why. We begin with a brief disquisition not on mankind but on the mango.
Now we can all, I think, accept that a mango grown in Pakistan will taste different to one from Jamaica, even if they are the same variety. Indeed, we can prove it (as I have) simply by eating one of each. Similarly, we know that the same variety of apple grown in Kent and Normandy taste different, one from t'other. We can narrow it down further, fruit connoisseurs maintain: a fruit grown in one orchard can taste different from the same fruit grown in an orchard a few miles away. I can go along with this, because if growing conditions differ then so will the fruit. And conditions in orchards only a few miles apart can vary because each will have a peculiar climate; these factors influence development enough
to affect flavour and perfume.
This is an encapsulation of what terroir means. But, as your head is screwed on the right way, you will have discerned the crucial difference between an apple and a wine grape. One is eaten from the tree, and the other is poured from a bottle.
In other words, a huge level of human manipulation is involved with the latter product that is entirely absent from the former. With wine, not only are the growing practices widely different but, above all, the creation of the finished wine from
the raw fruit is different, often unique to each individual producer. But the terroirists – the wine merchants and producers, the toffee-nosed wine writers and so-called experts – all want you to believe that in spite of all this individuality and science, the wine is merely the slave of the vineyard; that each individual vineyard expresses itself in the wine; that its terroir is distinct. The wise sages who believe Elvis Presley is alive and living on the moon are rationalists in comparison.
Heavens to Murgatroyd, what poppycock the terroir argument is! Would you believe me if I told you that no matter what chef is in the kitchen, the dishes from a particular restaurant always taste just the same because the ambience of the place was so potent that it overrode individual style and technique? Of course not. You would call me a mountebank and turf me out on my ear, quite rightly.
However, the terroirists want you to believe exactly this. Wine writers employ dozens of metaphors drawn from textiles to describe wines, from velvet to new leather, but in the case
of the terroirists I need only two: they use flannel to pull the wool over your eyes.
Why? First of all, wine writers, and the
high-end wine merchants they buttress, love terroir because it is more jargon that distances them from the drinkers they wish to hoodwink.
Secondly, those high-end wine merchants referred to above love it because it enables them to wax lyrical, even about bad vintages.
Finally, the wine producer loves it – partly because he too can wax lyrical; but above all, producers maintain the fiction because it protects the value of real estate by elevating
a discrete, demarcated area as supreme. This inevitably leads to high prices, and many wines being traded not as liquids drunk for pleasure but as commodities to be amassed for profit.
This war on terroir is, then, an unequal struggle. Massed against myself and my cohorts – a few wine writers, mostly in the New World, agree with me – are decades of acceptance of this concept of terroir by unthinking drinkers, the self-serving experts and the marketeers. These beliefs are also influenced by that cultural predisposition whereby many people think that the answer always lies in the soil. Just as humanity made myriad deities from the sun and the night sky, so we tend to believe that things grown have
a special status. It has been the world of wine's most conspicuous victory of fantasy over logic that so many people relate to terroir without having a clue what it is they have faith in.
In essence, terroir is bullshit. As such it is the most effective manure for vines, the most easily absorbed and the cheapest to create. This raises a question: if not the soil the grapes grew in, what does make the difference to a wine?
The answer is the winemaker. All truly smart drinkers know this. That is why they follow particular Burgundy (or claret or Barolo or Aussie Shiraz) producers and it is why the canny tippler wants to know who made the wine, above all other considerations, even before looking at grape variety and vintage. The other significant factors that influence wine, apart from the human, are grape varieties and climate. Of course, you need a vineyard that faces the right way and is free-draining and may be on a slope. The rest of the palaver – the stones, the rocks, the minerally bits, the chemicals in the soil – is hokum. Compared with the soul of the winemaker, the soil is
of as little consequence to the wine as the tree
that supplied the wood for the vineposts.
Malcolm Gluck's latest book, 'Brave New World', is published by Mitchell Beazley, priced £20.
Prices correct at time of publication.