The Phenomenology of Terroir
The Phenomenology of Terroir: A Meditation by Randall Grahm
“Terroir is a composite of many physical factors… as well as more intangible cultural factors. Matt Kramer once very poetically defined terroir as “somewhere-ness,” and this I think is the nub of the issue. I believe that “somewhereness” is absolutely linked to beauty, that beauty reposes in the particulars…”
by Randall Grahm
April 18, 2006
Editor’s Note: At last month’s Terroir Conference at UC Davis, a transcendent Randall Grahm delivered a powerful paper on the role of Biodynamics in getting our vines, wines and winemakers back in touch with their terroir. His talk, delivered to a crowd of mostly winemakers and scientists, makes a lot of sense to us here at AppellationAmerica and we thought it might to you as well. With His Eminence’s permission, we present to you here, his paper in its entirety.
I have called this talk, The Phenomenology of Terroir; you may therefore have some expectation of a degree of philosophical rigor. Your expectations, however, will be nonsystematically thwarted, as I was, as a philosophe manqué many years ago, never particularly rigorous. I found that the more sensual, tangible medium of winemaking and grape growing was a far more congenial playground for intellectual exploration.
I have come to an appreciation of terroir in a way analogous to how non-believers find their faith. Terroir was the great absence in my winemaking life. I had become reconciled to the notion that as much as I yearned to produce a wine that expressed terroir, producing such a wine in my single lifetime just struck me as impossible, and I was simply going to have to get over it. I came to biodynamics as a method of improving the quality of the grapes I was growing. At the time, I imagined that with more active microflora in the soil (one modest aspiration of the biodynamic proposition) I would be able to enhance the expression of minerality in the wine, an element that I believe is crucial to producing wines of depth and of organization, and the sine qua non of a vin de terroir. I now believe that while there are perhaps multiple routes to the discovery of terroir in one’s vineyard – there is an extremely esoteric technique called cosmoculture, which involves stone menhirs and Ley lines – it is essentially a form of viticultural acupuncture, that is particularly intriguing to me - biodynamics is perhaps the most straightforward path to the enhanced expression of terroir in one’s vineyard. Its express purpose is to wake up the vines to the energetic forces of the universe, but its true purpose is to wake up the biodynamicist himself or herself. 
I am still but a callow practitioner of biodynamics, but have become an unremitting seeker of terroir I have come to know that there are some very potent tools in the biodynamic arsenal to help elucidate terroir – and the chief one is the effect that it can produce in the practitioner – the ability to see the natural world with more sensitive eyes and the gradual cultivation of powerful intuition. There is another very practical tool called sensitive crystallization, which allows one to look far more deeply into a wine or a vineyard, beneath its obvious sensible presentation. With these tools one can develop a sense as to whether one is pursuing a path of discovery or simply wandering further into the labyrinth. On bad days, I feel like the Gene Hackman character in the movie, “The French Connection,” out in the rain, with my nose pressed to the window, looking in. On good days, I imagine that some day I will be able to sit at the terroir table.
As an aesthete (but not effete) lover of terroir, I will speak primarily about the aesthetics and poetics of terroir, perhaps polemicize a bit – (Why not? I have a captive audience) – and then touch briefly on some of the biodynamic methodologies that have relevance to terroir’s expression.
In the classical conception, terroir is the quality found in certain special wines, that transcends the winemaker’s personal style or aesthetic. It is the expression of the distinctiveness and individuality, the unique fingerprint of a particular vineyard site. Terroir, I am hoping to explain, is something like a Platonic form, or perhaps more concretely, a beautifully ordered wave-form that arises from a harmonically attuned vineyard – one wherein every element is in perfect balance. The formal information that is in this special vineyard is preserved, amplified, perhaps refined during the fermentation process of the grapes and emerges by dint of the winemaker’s skill, as the flavor characteristics of the wine. Some as yet unelucidated mechanism involving the minerality of the wine, I believe, acts as a medium to transform this information into a distinctive, unmistakable taste, analogous to the transformation of radio waves into aural sensation.
A great terroir is the one that will elevate a particular site above that of its neighbors. It will ripen its grapes more completely more years out of ten than its neighbors; its wines will tend to be more balanced more of the time than its unfortunate contiguous confrères. But most of all, it will have a calling card, a quality of expressiveness, of distinctiveness that will provoke a sense of recognition in the consumer, whether or not the consumer has ever tasted the wine before. Without becoming overly anthropomorphic, I would suggest that a great terroir site has something akin to intelligence, which is the ability to successfully adapt to a variety of climatic challenges. This innate intelligence can certainly be enhanced by the biodynamic practice.
The soil of a great terroir will have particular physical characteristics that allow it to extract more or less the correct amount of moisture from the soil appropriate to its needs, and trigger certain physiological signals (Dude, where’s my fruit? It’s time to stop growing.) in the plant at appropriate times, again, more consistently than its neighbors. The soil will have a chemical make-up that provides for all of the macro-elements in more or less balanced ratios, and very critically, will possess a definitive, eclectic assortment of oligo-elements.
Perhaps the presence of these trace elements in certain ratios adds more complexity to the vineyard color palette, which in turn enhances the complexity and distinctiveness of the wine palate. In any event, the crop yields must certainly be limited to enhance mineral concentration and the vine roots need to explore the entire soil profile. It is my personal belief, scientifically unconfirmed, that the typically large vines that we grow in California are counter-productive to the expression of terroir. Perhaps there is a dilution effect on the physical concentration of minerals or even on the subtle energetic fingerprint of the site, as the xylem has to move a greater distance. One thing I can state unequivocally: the pernicious practice of drip irrigation, as it is routinely practiced here in California, essentially infantilizes plants, turning them into dumb, sterile consumers, as if they were grown in flower-pots, making them gatherers rather than hunters, the viticultural equivalents of Chauncey Gardner, if you remember Peter Sellers in “Being There.” Needless to say, this essentially negates the possibility of the expression of terroir.
If there is a wave or vibrational form of terroir, the moisture in the soil is undoubtedly the medium through which it is transmitted. I have read that calcareous soils are strongly interactive with the dipole moment of water molecules, perhaps thus enhancing their informational conductivity. This is highly conjectural, but I would suggest that the absence of precipitation in the summer months in California may well make the expression of terroir problematic, as there is typically a disruption of communication between water in the surface layers and at depth. It is my sense that something like an ephemeral water table, such as one finds in Bordeaux, may well be the only way to really find true terroir under our arid conditions. 
Very naively I once imagined that you could simply analyze the mineral content of “great” terroirs, do a regression analysis and simply chuck in a little bit of manganese or whatever it was that you were missing in the soil. But this in fact misses the whole point: if there were a terroir extract or even a terroir “formula” that the lazy or ill-favored winemaker could add, sort of like oak chips or organoleptic tannin, all wines would begin to taste the same (such as they in fact do in the New World) and the essence of terroir would become trivialized and devalued.
The terroir intelligence does not entirely repose in the site itself, of course, but within the relationship that exists between the land and those who have farmed that land over generations. It is through experience, observation and countless iteration that some very clever person or persons determined that a very particular grape variety or individual genotype thereof on a particular rootstock on a particular soil type produced a wine that had a unique, special quality.
Terroir’s differentiating signal somehow shines through the non-trivial level of noise of climatic variation that occurs from one vintage year to the next, in the Old World, at least. You could possibly argue that the absence of significant climatic variation, such as we experience for the most part in the New World, precludes an expression of terroir. For the other part of the equation is the skill of the winemaker not only in rendering Clos de Vougeotness, but also in capturing the positive qualities of the vintage itself – its 2001ness. This notion is somewhat anathema to American sensibilities. We are happiest of course when every year behaves more or less the same, ideally a “great” vintage, of course. Perhaps this is because as recently-come-to-the-party wine connoisseurs we behave a lot like small children; we never seem to tire of hearing the same song played over and over again.
Terroir is a composite of many physical factors – soil structure and composition, topography, exposition, microclimate as well as more intangible cultural factors. Matt Kramer once very poetically defined terroir as “somewhere-ness,” and this I think is the nub of the issue. I believe that “somewhereness” is absolutely linked to beauty, that beauty reposes in the particulars; we love and admire individuals in a way that we can never love classes of people or things. Beauty must relate to some sort of internal harmony; the harmony of a great terroir derives, I believe, from the exchange of information between the vine-plant and its milieu over generations. The plant and the soil have learned to speak each other’s language, and that is why a particularly great terroir wine seems to speak with so much elegance.
I would like to now talk briefly about the vast chasm that exists between Old World and New World understandings of vinous beauty – the great Transatlantic Misunderstanding, if you will. As you know, we can make an effort to quantify the qualitative elements of classical physical beauty – ratio of nose length to distance from the eyes and so forth – and create an idealized model of a beautiful person. But as we also know, this idealized model will never be as beautiful as the beauty of a particular individual, whose features may in fact be utterly out of whack from the parameters of so-called classical beauty. There is just “something” about the singular beauty that stands out, and likewise there is just something intangible that is missing from the composite beauty.
In the Old World, excellence is linked to typicity, on a macro as well as micro level, which is to say that a St. Emilion can only be great, if it is recognizable as a St. Emilion, but obviously it must also have something more. This typical St. Emilion must embody both its generic identity qua St. Emilion, as well as a certain uniqueness within the appellation – the exception that proves the rule – as reflected in a brilliant terroir, such as Cheval Blanc, where its Chevalness is always unmistakable. Does the consumer need to have a mental map of a wine’s provenance, to be able to fully appreciate its quality? Yes and no. 
Really grasping the concept that a wine can be both a wine and a place is like suddenly acquiring the ability to taste the wine with two tongues, or to now hear a mono recording in stereo, moving from three dimensions to four dimensions. Feeling the place through the wine triggers something like synesthesia; it is the organoleptic equivalent of an out-of-body experience. If you have a history with the place, there is no doubt that it will create an even far deeper limbic reaction. But a great terroir wine will provoke a feeling that I can only describe as akin to homesickness, whether or not it is for a home that may only exist in your imagination.
Somewhereness. For a European it is everything. You need to come from somewhere and probably your family has been in that somewhere for years upon years; you need to know where you stand in a hierarchy, where you fit in. In our New World egalitarian, meritocracy, it doesn’t matter where you came from, it’s what you have achieved. New World wines are really all about achievement; they are vins d’effort, rather than vins de terroir.
Terroir has the power to evoke in us primal memories and associations. And certainly human intelligence is in part about perceiving and judging memory – in soil, wine and self. The construct of terroir is perhaps an atavistic product of our deep human need to link to the natural world, a need that has not vanished, despite its being systematically thwarted at every turn in the times in which we live.
Terroir speaks in a very still, small voice. It is easy not to hear it above the stentorian tones of 100% new oak, 15% alcohol and the extreme tannic extraction that we find in modern wines. We winemakers need to look long and hard in the mirror. Some of us aspire to produce vins de terroir but at the same time are loathe to make wines that are not très flatteur, i.e. obvious, i.e. highly commercial. The reality is that the most influential critics who shall remain nameless have essentially no appreciation at all for terroir; we are at a strange place indeed where the unnatural is held up as the ideal, and the natural is considered outré. Their counter-terroirism manifests in a predilection for the so-called “fruit bomb,” a wine of hyper-concentration and hyper-fruitiness (the vinous equivalent of a triple C-cup, without being too crude about it), largely in virtue of the extreme level of grape maturity. These wines are garish, painted ladies – adolescent fantasies of what a real wine might be. 
The language of modern wine criticism tends to be reductive and anatomizing – it slices and dices a wine into its component parts. Fruitiness… check, soft tannins… check, concentration… check. We have liftoff and a 90+ point wine. But a true appreciation of terroir is an appreciation of integration, balance and originality; it compels us to slow down and be present with a wine. Which brings me to the film, “Mondo Vino,” which I’m sure many of you have seen. While the film is polemical, unfair at times and its main thesis a bit muddied, I think that Nossiter basically got it right. There is in fact a war right now between the terroirists and the anti-terroirists. But the black hats are not merely the guys who are making industrial plonk and marketing it to us as real wine; far more dangerous are those who aspire to make “great wine” but have lost their own moral and aesthetic compass. We have all become so acutely self-conscious, so fearful of offending the critics, that we have stopped listening to our vines. Biodynamics, if truly practiced soulfully, brings one back to oneself and back to one’s vineyard, a literal grounding. To produce a terroir wine, there must be a seamless link between the wine-grower and his vines and a connection strong enough to drown out the din of competing voices.
I would like to bring up again the concept of minerality in wine and what its relation to terroir might be. I believe that virtually all of the New World wine critics utterly miss out on the importance of minerality, especially vis-à-vis the ageability of a wine, where I believe it plays the signal role. It is obvious to me that every wine of distinction must contain a rich concentration of minerals in some sort of favorable ratio, but no one to my knowledge has worked out an algorithm for this. I have lately become convinced that it is not just the mere material presence of minerals that lend a wine stature, but what is really at issue is how these minerals are organized.
Because when you taste a terroir wine, what you get above and beyond the particular aromatic nuances associated with a particular soil type – (schistous soils, for example, are said to give wines a sort of raw petroleum-like aroma, a benign thing, by the way) – more importantly, you get a sense of the organization of the wine. Somehow the intelligence of the soil and the vine interaction has been transformed into intelligence in the wine glass. There is the manner in which the various taste impressions sequence on your palate. You get the sense of the multi-dimensionality of the wine, like rotating a precious stone, so as to be able to view its facets from many different angles.
You get the feeling that there is something like capacitance at work – the release of different flavor components seem to be gradually released, almost metered out. Minerals are most certainly linked to the redox chemistry that goes on in a glass of wine – chemistry that is so complex that you understand why acid-base chemistry has historically been the default point of entry for comprehending wine chemistry or alchemy.
To be an inspired wine taster, you must be capable of experiencing synesthesia. “Ça descend la gorge comme le bebé Jesu en culottes de velours,” the French say. “It goes down the throat like the baby Jesus in velvet underwear.” A great terroir wine you can visualize as possessing a center, a core; I sometimes visualize terroir wines as planetary systems, with the minerals exerting the gravitational pull of the sun. Or, I see the minerals as the backbone, the skeleton of the wine, that which gives the wine stability and persistence. The various nuances of flavor radiate out from this center, as do the symmetric ripples in a pond.
I have always felt that language is highly inadequate to really describe the sensation of tasting a wine, certainly the language that merely breaks a wine down into its constituent components. Maybe a haiku, a spontaneous response, would make for more cogent wine criticism. But it turns out that there is a particular technique called “sensitive crystallization,” employed by practitioners of biodynamics, and it offers a different sort of language to talk about wine’s aesthetics; it speaks to a vine’s degree of connectedness to the soil, to its organizing and growth forces of the wine. I believe that it can serve as a rather vivid visualization of what we are talking about today. But first, I will say a few words about how biodynamics works in the service of terroir.
Biodynamics deals with how we might seek to harmonize our farming practices with the subtle forces of the universe, following the astronomical calendar – free cosmic fertilizer, you might say, and utilizing the biodynamic preparations, which essentially are a form of viticultural homeopathy. The presence of animal life on the farm is also crucial to the biodynamic proposition, with the idea that they also bring a contributing intelligence to the system. The biodynamic model would hold that the human intelligence is capable of identifying and summoning natural allies – be they from the plant or animal kingdom – to assist in amplifying the relevant cosmic forces, which in turn help to regulate the more observable but no less wondrous processes we see in plant growth and differentiation, photosynthesis, mineral absorption and the like. As an example, if we select the appropriate animal to graze our fields – sheep generally work pretty well – or produce a well-conceived compost, the effects of the manure or compost will help to “balance” the soils far more precisely and effectively than a grower might ever do on his own, adding material, organic or otherwise, to achieve an “ideal” soil chemistry. The object as a biodynamicist, is in fact not to have an ideal vineyard, but rather to have a vineyard that is in tune with itself. 
The intent of the biodynamic practice is, as I have said, to “wake up” the plants, so that they might become more tuned in to their surroundings. The medical analogy would be that you are boosting the vines’ immune systems, so that they are capable of coping with the environmental challenges that inevitably occur, and breaking the cycle of need for massive intervention on the part of the grower. Most importantly, the vineyard, or I should say, the agricultural organism, gradually becomes more individuated – its personality emerges; it becomes the macrocosmic reflection of the intent of the wine-grower, as it evolves into ever increasing homeostasis, requiring progressively fewer inputs. The overarching aim of the biodynamic work is to amplify the individuality of the site – its terroir, which has the concomitant effect of preserving more life force in the agricultural product. Vines are more resistant to disease and the wines themselves are healthier and more robust – more resistant to oxidation, and capable of greater longevity.
I have spoken largely in platitudes about how the biodynamic work supports the expression of terroir. In more practical terms, the biodynamic practice conduces to independence from soil amendments, which only serve to obscure terroir’s expression. A corollary of this is that biodynamically grown grapes seem to possess a more balanced nutritional profile vis-à-vis their fermentation behavior; we have found that they are generally complete the way they are and do not require nutritional supplementation, enzymes or cultured yeast to perform well – all interventions that deform the expression of terroir. One of the more obvious results of biodynamic farming is that one observes a much greater degree of uniformity of stand, both in terms of appearance of the vines as well as the ripening profile. This is definitely a step toward greater coherence and an identifying signature of the vineyard. Without indulging in too much anthropomorphism, the biodynamic practice, if done correctly, I am told, is capable of allowing the plant to become more sensitive, i.e. predictive of natural phenomena, such as killing frosts, drought and so forth.
By communicating better with the soil and with its surroundings, the plant is participating in the shared intelligence that is the essence of terroir. The biodynamic preparations can also be used shrewdly to move the wine towards greater elegance and economy. It has been observed both in the New World and in the Old World, that the parameters of phonological maturity are drifting ever upward. In other words, Grenache grapes used to taste ripe at 13.5% and now need to be 15% for comparable flavor intensity. The application of the biodynamic preparation 501, or horn silica, very carefully timed, will help to bring flavor development into better balance with the accumulation of sugar, leading to clearer expression of terroir.
Not all sites are created equal of course, and skillful biodynamic practice will not enable you to produce great wine from an indifferent site. But it just may, through the cultivation of the intuition of the grower, lead one to discern heretofore obscured qualities of a particular vineyard site. I will be very specific. I have a very funky vineyard in Soledad, in the Salinas Valley, not far from the Big House. There is nothing particularly prepossessing about the site, nor does the word “sustainable” make much sense in an area that receives about 6 inches of annual rainfall and whose irrigation source has a significant NaCl titer of the eponymous valley. For reasons mysterious even to me, I bethought to plant Albarino grapes on the site and the only real reason was that I remembered the saltiness of the air in the region of Rias Biaxas in Galicia. You can taste this wine in just a few minutes and will taste for yourself the fact that these grapes do in some sense “belong,” which I believe is another way of saying that they possess a degree of terroir.
I would like to now talk about the very odd, particular technique called “sensitive crystallization,” to which I had earlier alluded – an extremely powerful tool for elucidating some of the less obvious aspects of both wines and vines. It can tell you quite a bit about the felicity of the marriage between a particular grape variety or clone with a given rootstock on a given site. This could obviously be incredibly useful in making decisions about what you are planting on a given site. It can tell you about the degree of organization of a wine and its life force, speaking directly to its overall harmony and ability to mature and improve. In a sense, it is the glimpsing of the wine’s aura, its subtle body, not necessarily obvious from the impression one gathers in the physical realm. Sensitive crystallization is not a precise science, at all, not by a long shot. You do a number of replicates and they can all be a little bit different, but you do begin to see recurring patterns that are quite suggestive. To do the crystallization, you take your material, in this case a couple of milliliters of wine or tissue from the plant, mix it with a copper chloride solution, put it carefully into a Petri dish, and allow it to evaporate in a controlled environment. Voilà, you will observe a distinctive pattern, which is interesting if you have some inkling of how to make heads or tails of it.
I am somewhere in the sub-neophyte category as far as my ability to read these crystallizations. Certainly for many of the scientists here, this will seem like utter mumbo-jumbo and the pictures mere artifacts of phenomena very imprecisely grasped. But use your imagination and see what these pictures tell you. For me they can sometimes capture the essence of a wine far more accurately than words can do, and offer a way to visualize something that we have through language very clumsily groped to describe. Here is a 2002 von Volxem Riesling from the Saar, clearly a great terroir wine, and one that is to my knowledge, biodynamically farmed. The powerful acidity of the wine makes for a deep relief (white wines, by the way are a lot easier to read than reds) but nevertheless you can see how powerful this wine is, like a sun-burst. Note the highly articulated, dense and symmetrical branching pattern, indicating a strong presence of organizing forces in the wine. This is a wine that is capable of very long ageing. Note also the green tinge around the border, which is characteristic of organically and biodynamically grown wines.
Compare and contrast with a 2005 Riesling from a very young vineyard in Soledad, CA, which just happens to be ours. You see the pine-like needles that seem to shoot out very forcefully. They indicate strong growth forces in the vineyard. The vacuoles just below center indicate that the wine has a strong aromatic potential. It is my hope that perhaps as the vineyard gets older and the vines and soil become better acquainted, we will observe a greater degree of organization in the crystallization, and more importantly, in the wine. The one saving grace is the tinge of green that you observe at the periphery; this is an indication that this is an organically grown vineyard and contains a degree of life force. You will have a chance to taste this wine in just a few minutes.
This is a wine called Kokopeli made in southern France in Collioure, from very, very old vines. It is a real mineral wine – notice the depth of relief of the branching crystals and the absence of vacuoles. Note also that there are two loci in the center of the picture – this wine is made from two separate vineyards with slightly different soil typologies.
Here is a sensitive crystallization of a rosé wine made from a funny grape from Provence called Tibouren. Note the aromatic vacuoles and the very dense branching and the fact that the crystallization moves out to the very edges of the Petri dish. The peripheral zone of the picture speaks to the connection that the vine has to its soil. The crystal seems to hit the edge of the Petri dish and bounces back, indicating that these vines are very deeply rooted.
This is a picture of a very famous and fairly expensive California Cabernet Sauvignon, which shall remain nameless, for which I’m told people line up in the cold, wee hours of the morning at the winery to purchase upon release. Note that there is a discontinuity in the peripheral zone, indicating a lack of connection with the soil. There are numerous gaps in the crystallization and parts of the image are rather blurry. This is not a vin de terroir, that expresses a strong sense of place; its lack of organization is rather typical of New World wines that have been drip irrigated. I suspect that the vacuoles signify the very strong expression of highly aromatic new American oak.
To conclude, terroir is a descriptive mechanism that speaks to the intelligence or organizational force of a particular viticultural site, and miraculously persists through the vicissitudes of fermentation and maturation of a wine. It is a very special lens that allows us to experience a wine in a profound and deeply human manner, sparking a sense of recognition and connection to a larger whole, which is the basis of an aesthetic frisson and a great communion of the human spirit.
Randall Grahm, the original Rhone Ranger, is the charismatic proprietor and winemaker of Bonny Doon Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
quelle: http://wine.appellationamerica.com/wine-review/Randall-Grahm-on-Terroir.html
The Phenomenology of Terroir: A Meditation
