Terroir
Terroir is the taste of place. The word comes from French wine tradition — the claim that grapes from different vineyards, even adjacent ones, produce detectably different wines. The soil, the slope, the microclimate, the drainage: everything shapes the grape, and the grape carries the information into the bottle.
The concept extends beyond wine. Vermont cheddar tastes different from Wisconsin cheddar. San Francisco sourdough has its characteristic tang. Parmigiano-Reggiano can only be made in Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, and parts of Bologna and Mantua — legally and, producers claim, actually. The place is in the product.
Skeptics argue terroir is mystification. Blind tastings show experts can’t reliably identify vineyard of origin. Marketing attaches stories to commodities. The “taste of place” might be taste of expectation.
But something real underlies the romance. Soil composition affects plant chemistry. Different mineral profiles produce different grape acids and phenolics. Slope and aspect change sun exposure and ripening. Rainfall timing affects sugar concentration. These factors are measurable, and they vary by place.
The microbial dimension may matter more. Every location hosts distinct populations of yeasts, bacteria, and molds. Wine fermentation uses Saccharomyces cerevisiae primarily, but hundreds of other species participate in smaller roles. The blend differs by vineyard, winery, even barrel. These microbial communities contribute flavor compounds impossible to reproduce elsewhere.
Research is catching up. DNA sequencing of wine yeasts shows regional clustering. The organisms in Burgundy differ from those in Napa. When you transplant grapevines, you can bring the cultivar but not the full microbial community. The terroir is partly in the invisible life.
Cheese makes the case vividly. Raw milk cheeses carry microbes from the animal, the pasture, the dairy. Pasteurization kills them, allowing standardized cultures to dominate. Raw milk advocates argue that pasteurized cheese sacrifices terroir for safety — or more accurately, for consistency and liability reduction.
The same Comte recipe made with raw milk in the Jura and pasteurized milk in Wisconsin produces different cheeses. The difference is in the microbes, which are products of place. Terroir isn’t mystical. It’s ecological — the flavor signature of a particular community of organisms in a particular environment.
Go Deeper
Books
- The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz — Comprehensive treatment of fermentation including terroir’s microbial dimensions.
- Wine Science by Jamie Goode — Rigorous look at the science behind wine, including skeptical assessment of terroir claims.
- Terroir and Other Myths of Winegrowing by Mark Matthews — Provocative challenge to terroir orthodoxy.
Essays
- “From Vineyard Soil to Wine Fermentation: Microbiome Approximations to Explain the ‘terroir’ Concept” — Belda et al. (2017) in Frontiers in Microbiology. Key review of microbial terroir research.
- Research on regional yeast clustering by David Mills and colleagues at UC Davis — DNA evidence that microbes differ by wine region.
Practice
- Compare raw milk and pasteurized cheeses from the same recipe. The difference is microbial — and tasting it makes terroir concrete.
Related: [[fermentation]], [[wild-fermentation]], [[swales]], [[keystone-species]]