Confessions of a man faithful to terroir  6 March 2007

Martin Moore meets a wine writer who thinks it is dead

Death to Terroir! (poor thing)
Can you believe it: almost before we have all learned to pronounce terroir with a nice rolling rrrrr, the concept has been declared dead. I had to hear from a prominent visiting British wine writer that terroir was passé, rubbish in fact (although he admitted that climate, such an important part of terroir, nevertheless remained extremely relevant). Because “terroir” seems to mean a lot of different things to different people (trust the wily French who developed the concept) I rushed to Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion of Wine (so often my trusty source of reference) to see how she defines it.

And there it says, in the very first line, what I have always understood the term to mean, namely the total natural environment of any viticultural site. Robinson tells us the major components of terroir are soil and local topography, together with their interactions with one another and with the microclimate. “The holistic combination of all these is held to give each site its own unique terroir.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself! And I have always said the combination of soils and sun and slopes and sometimes bracing winds up here in the hills so close to the sea, gives this area a character different from all other, and allows us to make wines different from all other. Wines that carry, hidden in themselves, something unique of the place where they originated.

I am quite aware that there have always been two schools – the terroir faithful (like myself) and those who consider its impact overrated. That’s fine by me. What I do object to is treating terroir as a mere fashion accessory in the wine business which has served its time and is now being replaced by something else as the flavour of the month.

A unique footprint
No British (or any other) wine writer is going to convince me that terroir is not a crucial contributor to the character of a wine. Yes, I accept that advances in vineyard and cellar practices now followed in virtually all wine-producing countries have tended to obscure the differences between wines, but for me that has first and foremost to do with differences of quality, not of character. In fact, I want to argue that, if anything, those very advances help us to nurture and preserve in a wine its unique footprint.

For those who proclaim the death of terroir – “le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi” – the new “king” is the winemaker (which explains why my head lies so uneasy at night). Of course, that’s all very flattering and yes, it does contain some truth for it is how the winemaker steers the process, what decisions he takes at the different stages that ultimately determine to what extent the promise of the grapes is carried through in the wine.

 

The winemaker is in the wine
However, that very same visiting wine writer, a man prominent in his own country, claims that a winemaker’s personality leaves an indelible imprint on every wine he makes. Y-e-e-s, I suppose so, up to a point. But then he goes further – and this is where I wanted to run screaming into the vineyards – that he can reconstruct from the wine the personality of the winemaker!

He would, for instance, sniff a wine, briefly taste it and say: “This was made by a very nervous young winemaker.” Or, on tasting a second one, pronounce: “This winemaker is utterly confused. The wine is all over the place!”

Was he serious saying that? Back at the cellar I decided to find out, and to determine, once and for all, who I really was. The only one way of getting a complete picture was to re-taste our whole range. I pulled one cork after the other. Then panic started to set in. No two wines were the same. No coherent pattern was emerging. Hysteria started to build. I stopped spitting. I started drinking. And then, in the existential fog that enveloped me, I suddenly remembered I have always tried not to express myself in the wine, but to make wines I hoped would appeal to consumers. Relief flooded my body just before my head hit the floor.

Cork or screwcap – you tell me
We had almost two hundred readers respond to our request last time to tell us whether they preferred cork or screwcap closures. The outcome? Almost two to one. For? The screwcap: 118 to 62. And judging by the addresses it was mainly our local readers who felt an emotional attachment to the cork, well summed up by one reader who wrote that at least part of the enjoyment of drinking a bottle of wine “is the wonderful ritual and sound associated with pulling a cork”.

One again understood the old truth that people don’t like change but want to hold on to what is familiar. However, once they let go, what was new yesterday has become a familiar part of life today. “Who knows,” wrote one prophetic reader about the screwcap, “we may even grow to love the little bugger!”

Unlike so many South African wine lovers, readers overseas tended to have fewer problems with screwcaps as they claim most of the wines from the New World come like that in any case. The general consensus at this stage seems to be yes for screwcaps on white wines, no for reds that must still age for years. But I liked the view of one reader who said: “For me screwcaps have increasingly become a symbol of progressive winemaking and high quality.”

Another, however, raised an issue that has had me twisting and turning at night when sleep stayed away: What, he asked, are we going to do with the corkscrews once all the corks are gone?

In raising a glass this month I want to drink to all of you who helped us find some clarity about where we are going in the never-ending saga of the cork and the screwcap (for the last word has not yet been spoken!).