The myth and mystery of terroir
The Douro Valley
I’ve been thinking a lot about terroir recently. We are so drilled in the world of fine wine into preaching the power of site – but is it really everything we’ve cracked it up to be? Or are we inadvertently the terroir hype squad?
Port was the prompter for this initial thought. I took a deep-dive intothe firewater used to fortify the Douro’s classic wines – aguardente. It makes up a whopping 20% of every bottle and is intergral to the style, yet it often doesn’t even come from Portugal, being sourced mainly from France or Spain. And getting any further detail beyond that broadstroke nationality isn’t easy. How can we really talk about Port as being terroir driven when a fifth of it comes from so much further afield? Of course we want to look at the Douro Valley’s dramatic slopes and say the wines speak of them… but do they?
Penfolds challenged the concept recently too – with a release that is, as one friend said to me, “peak Penfolds”. Of course Grange – and many of the cult producer’s wines – have consistently been regional blends from across South Australia, although there has been a gradual shift to wines becoming more tied to a specific place. But two of its new Napa wines – retailing for unsurprisingly high prices – are labelled as “Wine of the World”, containing portions of South Australian fruit – shipped over as finished wine and blended in. I haven’t had a chance to taste them, although others have said they are determinedly Penfolds in style.
On the upside, at least there’s transparency in what they’re doing. Any number of bottles can be labelled one thing and contain a fairly decent dose of something else. In the EU, you can have up to 15% of a grape that’s different to the one on the label. In the US, that goes up to 25%, while 15% can come from a different AVA. You can even have 5% from a different vintage.
I’m not going to claim you can’t taste the difference between sites in Burgundy, or for that matter anywhere else. But I do wonder if perhaps we’re so eager for wine to be special, we set it on a pedestal, elevating it and separating it from other drinks or crafts – that we depend on the mystique of terroir to do so. And for the record, Port does taste like it comes from the Douro – but that’s not just because of the region’s terroir. It’s the indigenous varieties, it’s the traditional style, it’s the winemaking, and the terroir. There’s so much more to a good bottle of wine – and while any of the best winemakers will highlight that the secret is to do as little as possible, they’re doing a lot to make sure that they can.
Read my piece on aguardente here
