blank. It was assumed, and I mean specifically not proven by
science, that this idea of Terroir, loosely conceived as the soil
and the climate, was the perfect explanation that accounted for
the differences in wines as grown from one place to the next.
As we shall see, this is an 1850s, Farmer’s Almanac, hip-pocketin-your-overalls concept that is very antiquated.
Nonetheless, everyone believed it and most still do. I remember
myself as a young 23-year-old knownothing, standing in the
vineyard at Petrus during harvest, and asking the winemaker,
“What makes Petrus so special?” His answer: Le terre et le
soleil. That is, “the land and the sun”, or we say, “soil and the
climate.” Likewise, fine wines have largely been priced according to where they came from, based on the Hallowed Ground
Theory. You can see how this works to the advantage of the
owners of those properties where the “Hallowed Ground” supposedly exists. There’s a lot of money at stake here, both in the
wine market and the brand value. Conversely, it is also believed
and propagated that there is somehow a very tiny amount of
this “Hallowed Ground”, so really good wine cannot possibly
exist in many places. This prevents up and coming wine regions
from gaining access to markets they often deserve and protects
existing brands, even if they have bad years without The Right
Stuff.
Wine Science can be dangerous
to your beliefs
Today, when people come into my winery and taste Inwood
wines, they often express their amazement and immediately ask
me “what is it about the soil and the climate of Inwood’s vineyards that make them so good?” They are shocked when I
answer, “Not a thing.”
That’s because they are asking the wrong question. You see, in
the last 8-10 years, wine science has progressed so far it is
almost hard to believe. In the process, it has shredded our old
notions about what makes wine good. We can now identify The
Right Stuff in wine molecule-for-molecule. When we parse the
elements that cause those molecules to form, it turns out that
soil and climate have a lot less to do with it than we thought,
and often nothing at all.
The implications are far-reaching. It means that once humans
discover how to drive polyphenol production to higher and
higher levels in their fr Z]