The Wine WhisperersTerroir [tare-wah'], a French concept, translates roughly to the way climate, environment, and geology are expressed through wine. Terroir is so important to French viniculture that wine is identified by the name of a region—Champagne or Bordeaux—rather than by the name of the grape, as Pinot noir or Cabernet are in the United States.
But here in central California the French aesthetic has recently taken hold. Some local winemakers claim that rainfall, irrigation, the degree and direction of slope, the mineral and biological content of the soil, the agricultural history of the vineyard, the indigenous yeasts, even the number and variety of worms in the soil all impart character to wine. For California’s new “terroirists,” expressing this kind of nuance is the job at hand.
The new terroirists come in a range of ideologies. At the far left of the spectrum are those such as celebrity winemaker Andy Erickson, who co-owns Favia wines and also makes wines for six top wineries. They use no commercial yeasts, which convert the sugar in grapes to alcohol during fermentation, utterly trusting their vintages to the local soils and microbes. The biochemical composition of any vineyard’s grapes can vary from harvest to harvest, however, so other devotees of terroir hedge their bets and manipulate the wine’s chemistry, using nutritional additives, for instance, when they feel it necessary to achieve a certain taste. At the other extreme, some large, industrial wineries liberally use trade-secret chemicals to produce entirely predictable, generally palatable, and almost character-free wines, all the while casually bandying about the term “terroir” because—well, these days just about everyone in California does.
