A Sense of Somewhere…
In Chapter Five of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway surmises, “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.” Fitzgerald was referring to the tense and typically unspoken caste system of American culture. There is, however, an element of truth in this line that applies to winemaking. It involves defining terroir as an element of wine and winemaking. American farmers have much different - but no less valuable - relationships with land than their French counterparts. Today, we will look at what creates a distinctly American terroir.
Let us first accept that terroir is simultaneously everything and nothing to wine. It is everything of the earth, climate, water, air, and history that goes into a wine. But you can taste nothing directly representative of terroir in a wine. It is the secondary processes - fermentation, vessel-contact, and bottle-aging that create a wine’s taste profile. But to paraphrase wine writer Matt Kramer, wines made with respect for their circumstance taste like somewhere. We will return to this “somewhereness” momentarily.
If there was a single institution to point at as responsible for what we understand as the world of wine, it would be the Catholic Church. In France, up until the eighteenth century, it was the Church that controlled the land and its production more so than the state. The Catholic Church owned around ten percent of France’s land - all tax free. In Burgundy, the Cistercian order began planting vineyards in the eleventh century. Monks established the climats, Burgundy’s vineyard subdivisions each with their own unique name and identity; and the clos, the practice of walling off vineyards as private property.
The Cistercians provided the knowledge, land, and capital. Peasants did the work. Families tied to the land through legal contracts labored for generation to generation planting, growing, and harvesting. France, then, is a country where vine roots and family roots are intertwined. Even today, multigenerational families of winegrowers - some stretching back six or more - are common. Generational knowledge passes from fathers and mothers to daughters and sons. Understanding how a particular massal clone of Pinot Noir grows in the particular clay-limestone blend of Fixin is part of Burgundy’s terroir. The role of labor is paramount when considering who grows wine and how it is grown in France.
Consider the United States. A renowned winery like Wente in Livermore, California has passed through the hands of five generations. But this is the exception that proves the rule. Wine in the United States is a far different enterprise. Yet the absence of time and generational knowledge does not mean terroir is absent from American winemaking. Indeed, there are several producers whom The Wine Press features that capture that somewhereness not just admirably but expertly. I will highlight two.
When Derek Rohlffs talks about the land, you cannot help but believe him. He farms Anderson Valley, an appellation (AVA) north of Napa and Sonoma near Mendocino, California. Fog is the variable here, sweeping in from the Pacific each morning - dense, gray, and persistent. It is a cold, wet blanket that makes growing Chardonnay and Pinot Noir a trial in patience. But Derek manages something extraordinary every year. He harvests when the grapes are ready, neither too early nor too late. He adds nothing extraneous to his wines. They are all water, land, light, and fruit. This minimalist approach, Derek contends, gives Bravium Wines the unmistakable quality in wine called terroir.
Much farther down the road from Bravium Wines, in the Oak Knoll District of Napa Valley, there is no sign for Matthiasson Winery. It is a blink-and-you-will-miss-it turn off Dry Creek Road, past a set of wrought-iron gates, and up an eighth of a mile to the windswept and heat-soaked winery. Valley floor Chardonnay is clean and crisp, all honeycrisp apples and bright grassy earth. Aged Cabernet Sauvignon is savory with pencil shavings, dusky cherries, and the refined note of pipe tobacco. Matthiasson vintages are not identical, but they do rhyme. The terroir is a living element in Jill and Steve Matthiasson’s wines.
Neither the Matthiassons nor Derek Rohlffs would or should be considered “peasants” in the old world sense. Their knowledge is derived from the experience of generations but not handed down in the same way. The American spirit of collaboration with entrepreneurship abounds, in contrast with the French ésprit of collaboration with tradition (which is, to be sure, falling more and more by the wayside as a new generation of winemakers deconstructs their parents and grandparents methodologies - a topic for another time). They are both tied to the land, however.
To be a winemaker is to be a farmer, a person whose hands and feet are figuratively and literally rooted in the earth. It may not be absurd to conclude that to taste the terroir in a wine is to taste the hand of the winemaker. It is that hand which is, at once, omnipresent and invisible in each sip.
