Gluttons Club

Ever since I started paying attention to the finer points of wine and food, I've come across the notion of terroir and the endless arguments over its value. Simply defined, terroir is the impact of microclimate, soil, care and voodoo that makes growing things, particularly wine, taste a way that is different than the exact same thing grown a hundred miles, or a hundred yards away. The dispute is over how important this is though I don't see how. There are certainly ways of diminishing its effects in order to homogenize flavors and characteristics but when fruits and veggies are simply grown with minimal impact, the character of the environment will show for good or bad. It is what makes us prefer foods and drinks from certain places whether we're talking cheese, wine, coffee or beef. Last week, I got a lesson on terroir from a French wine producer who is a believer in the importance of place.

Gerard Bertrand is a winemaker in the Pays d'Oc, the part of France bordering Spain on the Mediterranean coast. He was at the tasting with his US importer/distributor to try to sell his wines to retail outlets and restaurants in the Boston area. His passion for the wine is clear; he practically grew up making wine, detouring briefly to play professional rugby but now is a full time wine guy. The tasting wasn't very crowded so I had a chance to linger with each wine and talk to him about them.

He releases wines under several labels but the ones that caughty my interest were the estate bottlings (all of the grapes came from specific vineyards) that came from three different sections of the Pays d'Oc: Minervois, Corbieres and Languedoc. Each was a similar blend of the typical grapes of the region: Syrah, Grenache, Carignan and occasionally, Mourvedre. The different estates in the different regions produced wines that reflected the differences in climates, elevation and soil. With him providing details, I was able to pick out the effect of sea breezes vs. mountain air, clay soil vs, gravel, low-lying valleys versus hillsides. All these things were there because he took care to preserve them. His reserve estate bottlings, which were produced in small batches from grapes grown in single parcels were even more impressive.

The terroir debate rages on in the wine world (see the film "Mondo Vino" for an argument against the universalization of flavor) but I was lucky enough to hear one man's argument for why his few acres in the south of France were so important the wine he makes. To him, the wine isn't made to suit a style or taste but it is a representation of the place it comes from. One can see this in more than just wine. Taste the difference in olives grown in different places or apples from a local orchard in October versus the shiny perfect ones from the supermarket. As an extreme example, look at the perfect form and flavor of hydroponically grown produce versus the stuff you might grow in your own yard. You'll notice both benefits and shortcomings to terroir inflected foods but the important thing is that things taste different in different places. Without it, there would be no joy in eating fresh, local corn in the summer, fresh caught fish or wine made in small batches by hand with minimal impact from production. Simply, life would be less exciting if everything we eat tasted the same day in and day out.