“Talk Dirt to Me”

“Talk Dirt to Me”

“Talk Dirt to Me” is the title of an essay by Harold McGee that was published last May in The New York Times and that I just got around to reading (you can access it free, but you have to register, which is easy and way worth it).

The piece is about “terroir,” which McGee defines as “the concept that one can taste rocks and soil in a wine.” I love McGee’s iconoclastic approach to food and cooking truisms, which is, basically, to disprove them; he writes:

…about the flavors of soil and granite and limestone that wine experts describe as minerality — a term oddly missing from most formal treatises on wine flavor. Do they really go straight from the earth to the wine to the discerning palate?

No.

That is the fundamental premise, which I have to agree with, and this is an excellent article – particularly useful for anyone who likes wine and has used terms like “flinty” – but I’m not sure I agree that many of us use the term “terroir” to mean that what we’re drinking tastes like something with geologic, lithic, rocky or stony flavors.

I use the word “terroir” much more regularly to describe cheese, and here I think the term may actually have some use. Cows, goats and sheep eat the grasses, weeds, etc., in specific parts of the world; these different vegetables give the milk a different flavor. That general interpretation of “terroir” makes sense to me. Ask a farm boy (viz, Napoleon Dynamite) what he tastes in the milk, and he will tell you something like “this one got into the onions,” or “she was eating garlic.”

I did put rocks in my mouth as a kid. I think I may have licked limestone once. I don’t recall that it tasted like much. So in that regard, I agree with McGee. However, I think his definition of “terroir” may be overly tight. I believe that when we refer to the “dirt” that influences flavor of a wine or cheese we are referring to all the factors in a place – including the inhabitants of that place (which McGee acknowledges) – that contribute to the taste of a good food or beverage and give it a flavor like no other.

Hammond

Funny that this should come up - I was just remembering recently that my earliest culinary experiment was at the beach as a child. I made a pie out of sand that looked so good I couldn't resist tasting it.

The disappointment of that moment is etched in my memory forever.

Interesting topic - thanks for bringing it up.

I agree - I think it's basically a semantic thing, and while I have the utmost respect for McGee (who couldn't?), I think his definition in this case is unusually restrictive. Admittedly, I haven't read the article (NY Times said it was an archived article, and would charge $4.95 to see it, and I'm cheap), but I've always thought terrior means the combination of soil and geography that can make a difference in the way a grape (or any agricultural product, for that matter) tastes. Something akin to this definition:

The Vintner's Art by ]ohnson and Halliday wrote:Terroir looks at all of the natural conditions which influence the biology of the vinestock and thus the composition of the grape itself. It is the coming together of the climate, the soil and the landscape. It is the combination of an infinite number of factors: hours of sunlight, slope and drainage, rainfall distribution, etc.

I've never thought of it as literally the flavor of whatever the root is in contact with being magically transported into the fruit. After all, the root is likely to be from a different variety and even species of grape than the variety grafted on top.

But I think on the basis of Johnson and Halliday's definition, there is likely to be little discussion that terroir is a real factor in the flavor of wines. And I do like a nice, flinty Sancerre from time to time, even though I doubt there's really any flint in the glass.

Re-reading this, I think I'm agreeing with much of what Hammond said, just with more words and less eloquence.

nr706 wrote:Admittedly, I haven't read the article (NY Times said it was an archived article, and would charge $4.95 to see it,

How odd. I'm was able to access it just by registering (which I did about four years ago).

nr706 wrote:I think his definition in this case is unusually restrictive.

That was my sense as well. I puzzled over the first two pages until I got to this:

The place where grapes are grown clearly affects the wine that is made from them, but it’s not a straightforward matter of tasting the earth. If the earth “speaks” through wine, it’s only after its murmurings have been translated into a very different language, the chemistry of the living grape and microbe. We don’t taste a place in a wine. We taste a wine from a place — the special qualities that a place enables grapes and yeasts to express, aided and abetted by the grower and winemaker.

At which point I couldn't really figure out who he was disagreeing with, or which cherished position he was knocking down. It strikes me he's attacking a position that is pretty far beyond the scope of my yeoman's wine knowledge.

I found the third page more interesting, particularly what seemed to me a contention that the various tastes associated with terroir in, say, various French vineyards and regions, owe as much or more to the cultivation and vinification of the grapes as the land. Unfortunately, I thought this point was hardly substantiated with McGee's trademark scientific rigor. My palate is insufficient to differentiate one Beaune vineyard from another, or probably even France from Oregon, so it's hard to develop an empirical opinion.

Regardless, of whether they appear in tasting manuals, I find terms like "minerality" and "flinty" useful descriptors in wine taste, but I've never thought that to be an actual description of the rocks in the soil in which the grapes were grown. Just the taste of the wine.

It is my impression that California pinot noir growers have tried at great length to emulate the character of a French burgundy, but with relatively little success (though putting out some very fine wine), and that an experienced wine taste could, generally speaking, distinguish between a California wine attempting Burgundian style and a true Burgundy much more often than not. I may be completely wrong here, I don't know, but that pretty much sums up my understanding of terroir (as applied to wine).

By the way, I was able to read the article without paying.

Interesting (and completely off-topic), every time I log into the NYTimes site and search for the article, they want to charge me $4.95 to see the whole thing. But doing a google search for "harold mcgee dirt site:nytimes.com" takes me to the article, no charge. Go figure.

nr706 wrote:Interesting (and completely off-topic), every time I log into the NYTimes site and search for the article, they want to charge me $4.95 to see the whole thing. But doing a google search for "harold mcgee dirt site:nytimes.com" takes me to the article, no charge. Go figure.

A weird and valuable to know phenomena. Thanks!

Regards,

I emailed Harold McGee this afternoon, referencing this discussion, and he responded, giving me permission to quote this paragraph from our exchange:

"The "tight" literalist view of terroir is not mine; it's rampant in the US wine and restaurant world, and we start by quoting a well-known importer and wine writer and restaurant wine list as examples...There's a book on terroir by geologists that suggests the same thing. I guess Chicago has been spared all this! But trust me, it's not about knocking down a straw man. I wouldn't have spent the considerable effort for an exercise like that, and we wouldn't have gotten so much mail from winemakers if it was. There's a fascinating and complex history to the term, and to the attribution of quality to place, and that's what we delved into."

Very interesting, and nice of him to respond.

I could have been more clear above, in framing my reaction based on my own limited experience to high wine criticism. I didn't believe he was really knocking down a straw man, but the position he was criticizing was so foreign to me, that its existence is of more interest to me than its rebuttal.

I wonder if, as he suggests, my ignorance has anything to do with geography. Surely you can find this literalist view of terroir in Chicago (or KC for that matter), but my year-long stint at Binny's and subsequent, moderate wine talk exposure never lead me to share it, or believe it strongly held at shops around town.

Terroir is tricky. I've been an off-and-on professional winegrower, winemaker, and sometimes wine journalist for 35 years. Plus, I write sometimes about wine aesthetics in my day job, as a philosophy prof. I started out believing as my Davis gurus would have me believe: soil is a physical structure for growing grapevines, end of story.

But after all these years I've come to understand that the relationship between growing vine and its soil is nuanced beyond the incredible: it looks like being beyond comprehension. There was a recent discussion on the grapebreeders list re: subtle variations in soil pH and its effect on grape biochem profile. Typical chaotic system, butterfly effect: overwhelming influence of initial conditions.

Moreover, understanding terroir just begins with soil. It is, most importantly, an historico-cultural set of constraints that works with soil. Aaron, with practice you'd most certainly be able to tell the difference between fair (in the taxonomist's sense of the word) specimens from your two regions.

I'll have a chapter appearing next month in a Blackwell's book on philosophy and wine. In it, I define terroir in the following way, given thousands of years of local experience with types of vines:

"In the end, the result of all this experimentation and selection has been the gradual settling down of winegrowing and winemaking into a vast number of divergent terroirs—tight clusterings of varieties, terrain, soils, climate and tradition-based production techniques"


That's what I say, and I'm stickin' to it!

Geo

Geo,

That's pretty consistent with my understanding of terroir too, which is why I was so surprised to read McGee's article attacking the position that it relates strictly to being able to taste the rocks and soil in the wine.

Regarding Oregon and France, you know, it's funny, I have definite taste memories of how I expect the flavor profiles to differ between some of these regions, but the handful of blind tasting type events I've been to have been of the gamey sort designed to throw you off.

Cheers,

Aaron