Mar 10 2010
Terroir – Debunking the Myth. A Taste of Place, Evening Land Vineyards; Aspen Food and Wine Festival.
It’s the second day of the festival, but it’s my fourth day in Aspen(http://www.foodandwine.com/). Last night was the Texas Outlaw Party. It was raucous Texan style event…held ironically in a Japanese restaurant. I’d love to show you pictures to prove that I was there, but in some sort of wine induced delirium, my camera went missing (OK, a Bordeaux delirium if you must know – Washington’s Bordeaux Style Reds (http://www.washingtonwine.org/). –This afternoon session @ Little Nell’s tent, had all of maybe 10 people. A make shift renegade posse forms, in the form of a wine decanter to make sure none of these beautiful Washington state wines went to waste!
I’m sure the camera was “stolen” though, as there’s no possible way I could have lost anything during a wine delirium.
So, Didi 2.0, social median, was no longer fully able to document the rest of the festival. WAH, WAH.
Despite this set back, I made a bold move. With fierce blogger determination, I selected Danny Meyer’s, Terroir: a Taste of Place, as my first seminar of the day. We are talking 10 am here. TEN A.M does not seem like the time for an esoteric wine discussion.
Although I was foggy from last night, I really wanted to get to the bottom of this “terroir” bull roar. It’s all I hear about nowadays. Yes, I know what the word means but, I’ve yet to really taste this “sense of place, where the grape comes from.”
Terroir is far beyond my junior varsity palette…for now.
To illustrate how Terroir affects the taste of a wine, Meyers and his partner Mark Tarlov, of Evening Land Vineyards, pours 3 Pinot Noirs made from exact same clone, using the exact same techniques. Two grapes are grown right next to each other in Oregon (heart, heart), and one Pinot was grown in Santa Barbara. I listened intently with every ounce of my concentration, and I thought, “This is IT. I’m going to figure this shit out once and for all!”
Wine number one was grown in Santa Barbara. Wine number two from Oregon, was grown deep in iron-rich limestone. Wine number three was grown, only a stone’s throw away from number two grapes, but in a deeper volcanic ash. All three resemble Pinots, while remaining distinctly different. “Can I taste the earth”, asks the speaker? I get a small amount minerality or chalkiness from the one grown in the deeper soil. The Washington and the Santa Barbara of course taste different to me, but that’s obvious, right, being from two different regions altogether? If I blind tasted all three once again, would I be able to ramble on about the TERROIR? Yeah…that would be a big fat no.
I would most likely conclude that they were 3 different Pinots. Different clones grown in different regions. Or even, same clones, different wine making techniques? Say one was held in American Oak, one in French Oak, another in Steel Case with old French Oak at the end of fermentation. Seems to me there must be a million different variables that could be attributed to the differences I tasted, but the last thing I would conclude would be the illustrious TERROIR.
I hang my head. The mystery lives on with a disjointed, dazed and confused Outkast’s beat “ She Lives In my Lap” looping through my head except the lyrics read “TERROIR lives in my head” (“make me want you, make me miss you, remind me who you are”). My head was spinning a bit. How did I miss this? Was there a rufie in my Pinot?
Through the beat in my head I came back from my daydream to hear the wine maker talking about how “stress” affects grapes. My mind again joins the seminar. Finally, these people are talking about something I can understand. I latch on.
It’s rudimentary. Stress on the vines builds character, it’s like any other life cycle. A lot of people in hell would like a cool drink of water – unfortunately, it doesn’t’ t work like that. It’s the same with wine. The harder you have to work to produce juice (as a grape) the more depth and character your juice will have.
I tasted Three Wines. One wine from the Central Coast, and two from Orgeon. The Central Coast Wine grapes lives la vida loca, while her Orgonean cousins face tougher living conditions. The small nuget of information about stress rings true in all three of the wines I taste from Evening Star Vineyards. While I may not have grasped TERROIR, I got something.
The seminar ends with a kick. Danny cranks up the Beatles. He’s made up new lyrics. We all sing along. Baby you can drive my car, if you want to drink TERRIOR. This put a smile back on my face, and I left happy. I still don’t get TERROIR, but I now know what builds character in grapes. I feel like I am on my way.
Later, I relate my frustration to a wine maker friend. He chuckles at me, “you can’t get that from one seminar, it’s something you learn with time. Sort of an acquired taste”. The beat looping in my head changes from Outkast to The Beastie Boys, and I thought, “damn, he knows what he’s talking about”.